Wow, a documentary about Borat! Who said documentaries were boring? As the story goes it is common knowledge that Sacha Baron Cohen took advantage of poor villagers in Romania when he filmed his movie. I thought that this doc was going to be about how the villagers rose up and stuck it back to Sacha through a lawsuite. Well, that isn’t exactly how this one panned out.
The movie mostly focuses on 17-year-old Carmen who works in her father’s bar, waiting on layabouts, watching Spanish soap operas, and planning a life far, far away. As Carmen searches for a husband in her small village of Glod, big city lawyers come to town and convince her father to file the lawsuit against Borat for the way the villagres were portrayed in his movie. As the whole lawsuit thing happens, we keep watching as Carmen deals with her life as a 17 year old girl in her village.
I have been trying to connect the two distict story lines in some type of metaphorical way, but I can’t. The whole lawsuit story line is kind of a let down and the Carmen story line is what it is. The only common thread that I could find was:
(1) Borat goes to Glod and takes advantage of poor villagers so that he can profit.
(2) American lawyers go to Glod and try to take advantage of poor villagers with the promise of a big settlement so that they themselves can profit
(3) Documentary makers go to Glod, and make a movie about it all. Documetary makers are poor, but they likely will profit from this movie too, or at least they got paid to make it.
(4) Glod continues to get screwed.
Schedule
6:30 PM Saturday, May 2 – Bloor Cinema
4:30 PM Sunday, May 3 – The ROM Theatre
9:30 PM Sunday, May 10 – Cumberland 2