Duped by Borat, couple rises above insults and has a laugh

NEWTON -- Their home is nowhere near Atlanta, as the movie leads viewers to believe. But fuzzy geography is the least of the improbables attached to how Joe and Miriam Behar fell prey to the "Borat" crew last year, escaping with not only their dignity intact -- most of it, anyway -- but waving two thumbs up for a movie that mocks virtually everyone in it.

Improbable? Try these:

The Behars, a retired couple who've operated a kosher bed-and-breakfast in Newton for the past dozen years, say they were baldly misled about the nature of the film when contacted by one of its producers, in May of 2005, and asked if their inn could be borrowed for a night's filming. (A Kazakh travel documentary to be shown only in Kazakhstan? Right.)

When the crew showed up to shoot a few weeks later, the Behars were paid minimally for their efforts, despite gamely going along with whatever the cast and crew threw at them. (A few hundred bucks? Marty Scorsese shells out more than that to rent a parking space.) Meanwhile, the guerrilla comedy is raking in millions at the box office.

Finally, the Behars were transformed into cockroaches at the end of their four-minute scene (Borat Sagdiyev , the film's prejudice-crazed protagonist, calls them "shape-shifting Jews"), an anti-Semitic conceit causing some moviegoers to wince between guffaws. Joe Behar, for one, is so outraged by the bugs he can barely contain himself.

"Do you see any cockroaches in this house?" he asks a reporter, one of several who've dropped by his home lately. "Look around. Do you? This house is spotless. Never had a cockroach. Never, never."

There are none in sight, either, although that's not really the point of the scene. But we digress.

Rewind to the setup:

Borat (played by actor-comedian Sacha Baron Cohen , who is Jewish) and his fictional producer are driving around Atlanta looking for a place to spend the night. They pull up at the Behars' B&B, where Joe greets them wearing a yarmulke -- a sure sign that things are about to get hilariously ugly in a movie that pokes fun at everyone from feminists to Pentecostals, yet saves its sharpest barbs for all things Jewish.

Borat enters and notices Miriam's paintings on the walls. When she explains the Jewish theme behind some of them , he looks horrified. "We must escape," Borat warns his partner. Which they do, but only after Borat spits out a pastrami sandwich the Behars have graciously brought him, and then thrown money at the two roaches crawling menacingly across his bedroom floor.

If that sandwich was tasteless, what to call the insect imagery ? Indigestible? Seems about right.

Is it naivete, then, or a bite of the Warholian apple that explains why the Behars have been smiling through interview after interview over the past few days? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is neither.

They get the jokes in "Borat." They know character from caricature. They realize they were pranked by the filmmakers -- Cohen never broke character while inside their house, according to the Behars -- but the scene's humor was not entirely at their own expense, they point out, since Borat is the biggest idiot onscreen, not them. And they claim not to have done any of this, including granting interviews, for fame or money. Although a bit more of the latter would be nice, they say.

"To me it's an anti-Muslim movie, not anti-Jewish, because Kazakhstan is mostly Muslim," says Miriam, a retired elementary schoolteacher who loves to bake and paint. She and Joe married in 1963. They have two grown children, one of whom warned his parents that they might not like the film once they got around to seeing it.

(For the record, that happened on Nov. 6. The Behars paid for their tickets, too.)

"My biggest fear is they were making a porn movie or something," says Joe, who was born and raised in Israel and worked as a mechanical engineer until retiring in the early '90s. "The director said I was a good actor," he adds, smiling. "If they want to be equitable about it, though, I think they should compensate everyone involved in a more decent way."

Did he suspect this was no ordinary documentary once Cohen started doing his crazy-Kazakh schtick?

"Just once, when he said he was going to Mailbu to marry some girl," Joe replies. "I lived there for 30 years, and what kind of Malibu woman would marry a guy from Kazakhstan?"

Then again, had Joe even heard of Ali G., Cohen's other well-known alter ego, he might have caught on much more quickly. Now that he's seen the actor's work, though, Joe has become a big fan.

"He's a master actor. He puts people in a mental environment where they can't think straight," Joe says. "No director can teach you that."

The movie's timing could not better, he contends. "Worries about war, the elections, the environment -- at times like these, people have an inner need to laugh. And who can do that? Only a Jew."

The Hollywood ending to this story might go something like this: Genial innkeepers book reservations through 2010 after being featured in hit comedy. Film fans flock to out-of-the-way B&B searching for "Borat (Almost) Slept Here" sign. Christie's stages auction of Miriam Behar paintings, collectors line up to bid.

Alas, that's not in the script. In reality, the Behars have been booking fewer guests than ever, as age and health issues have made innkeeping more arduous. Miriam isn't painting much anymore, either, and "Borat" fans won't find a B&B sign outside, much less one connecting it to the hit movie.

Some things don't change, however, even after a celluloid terrorist attack by a pair of crazed Kazakhs.

"My wife loves people," Joe says with a twinkle in his eye. "She loves to tell them stories about all the paintings."

It's safe to say she won't be running out of those anytime soon.

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.