Romania, the virtual Kazahstan

Without knowing what they were getting into, the peasants in the Romanian village Glod became actors not in Borat – the movie, but in some kind of planetary snowball that is mixing the reality of newspaper headlines with the fiction of the movie, which in its turn was extracted from another reality. However, their argument that they didn’t know in what their images would be used for is not valid. How innocent one can be to accept one or two thousand Romanian old leu (ROL, roughly 3-5 euros) to take your pig inside your home, put a sword in the hand of a child or, in general, to take part into all the circus that can be seen in the movie? Pretending one didn’t know what he or she was doing is, under the circumstances, hypocrisy.

The Borat-Glod villagers case has a virtual component, because it is all about a war of ghosts or a fight between images. Sasha Baron Cohen’s image, Borat, has arrived to Kazahstan, which is actually an image of Kazakhstan, located in Romania. And Edward Fagan’s altruistic rallying to the Glod villagers’s cause will result in good publicity for Fagan & D’Avino, the well-known lawyers firm in NY. Also, Sasha Baron Cohen’s image, Borat, has a good reason to become a headline in the newspapers, after the other one, regarding the American teenagers’ laments that their images appear drunk in the movie. And the controversy will attire audiences in the movie theatres.

Nicolae Tudorache from Glod accepted some money to wear a dildo as a plastic hand, and now he thinks the money were not enough. He claims, probably, that he was not aware of the reason dildos were invented. However, he managed to reach the lawyers bureau in New York, that is, of course, in case Fagan & D’Avino didn’t smell some good mentions in the newspapers and sent their emissary to Glod, Romania. The first version is unbelievable, the second, unproven.

The villagers in Glod are some kind of Romanian ‘Cheaters’ (‘Trădaţi în dragoste’): real persons claiming to be fiction characters. We, Romanians, shouldn’t lament and ask why in the Earth it’s us that became Borat’s Kazahstan. The answer is easy: because Nicolae Tudorache, a villager in Glod, accepted to wear in the movie a plastic penis as an artificial hand. And got 150,000 ROL for his performance.

(Originally published [RO] in Evenimentul zilei, on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006)

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