Bannas Woody Allen What's the Spanish Word for
When asked why the film was called Bananas, Woody Allen famously said that it was because there are no bananas in it. In fact there is an allusion to bananas being San Marcos' greatest export (along with dysentery).
The reason for movie's title is actually obvious. San Marcos is a banana republic in Central America, that is to say a country that exports bananas and notoriously has an unstable political regime that is beset by revolutions and dictatorships. On a broader level, Allen is suggesting that the events that he describes in the movie are bananas, i.e. crazy.
Bananas is a political movie in the sense that the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup (an obvious influence on this film) is a political movie. That is to say, the movie is not seeking to make any specific political point other than to say that all politics are absurd. Allen's hero, Fielding Mellish is a sane man in an insane world. More accurately he is a mildly neurotic man in an intensely neurotic world.
As with the Marx Brothers, Allen is not making a serious statement about the issues covered by the film, and that is the point. The message is almost the absence of a message. These issues are too preposterous to be taken seriously. Hence while people die and are threatened, we see no blood. The tone of the film remains determinedly light.
We see this in the movie's opening scene where the assassination of a San Marcos ruler is presented like a live sports event by a couple of stiff-necked presenters, one of whom tries to interview the dying leader as if he is a defeated player announcing his retirement.
This was the first film where Woody Allen had creative control, and it did a good deal to establish the signature style that marked his early movies – his clumsy, nerdish persona, the mixture of slapstick comedy, surrealism, improvisation and intellectual allusions (e.g. to Kierkegaard), and the teasing sexual content that is more often talked about than seen. There are also nods to arthouse movies, including a send-up of the dream sequence in Wild Strawberries, and a pastiche of the famous pram scene from Battleship Potemkin.
There are a few arty touches that anticipate Allen's more serious movies. The assassination at the beginning of the film is intercut with close-ups of the dictator's face and the gun that shoots him, thereby breaking the illusion that we are watching a news report. Later the camera rapidly cross-cuts between images of the guerrilla army when Mellish meets them.
For the main part though, this is popular entertainment, a mood that is set by the opening credits with their comic music and bullet holes being shot in the names of the cast. Mellish exhibits the trademarks of Allen's earlier nebbish personality, and this is used to mock everything that he sees.
Mellish works as a product tester, and we first see him clumsily failing to cope with a contraption that allows office workers to exercise while they work, complete with a cycle and basketball. Allen's antics may be farcical, but not as ridiculous as the invention itself which was obviously doomed to fail. The scene is a clear nod to a similar device in Charlie Chaplin's film, Modern Times – only Allen is not satirising the mechanisation of the modern workplace; he is laughing at the obsessive craze with keeping fit, a more contemporary concern.
We see that Mellish is a loser. He has a battered car. He falls down manholes. He wears prominent glasses, even in bed. Like many Allen heroes, he sees a therapist. Even the girl at the office who is always ready for action turns him down. His attempts to discreetly buy porn magazines end in embarrassment. Later he tries to outwit a few thugs on the subway, but he is unsuccessful. (One of the thugs was a young Sylvester Stallone who nearly did not get the part because Allen thought he did not look tough enough.)
His life changes when he meets an idealistic activist called Nancy (Louise Lasser, who like other leading Allen actresses, such as Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow, was romantically involved with Allen at around this time, though they were divorced by then). She knocks on his apartment to ask him to sign a petition, and he agrees to picket an embassy to impress her.
He does not impress her however. She decides that there is something missing, but he decides to visit San Marcos anyway, a place that she has been picketing about. First he has to have an argument about it with his parents who are both surgeons. As this is an Allen comedy, the discussion takes place while they are operating, with interjections from the patient, and of course the parents are Jewish.
It is at San Marcos that the movie's more satirical elements emerge. This is an agrarian country where the president receives manure as a tribute, guards torture prisoners by forcing them to listen to operetta, and musicians mime performance when they have no instruments. Actually the scene was intended to have musical instruments, but they did not arrive, so Allen improvised by filming the scene with the musicians pretending to play.
The government tries to have Mellish assassinated, so that they can blame it on the rebels, and win the support of America. However while the assassins complain about the poor tailoring of their fake guerrilla outfits, Allen is rescued by the real freedom fighters, and is forced to join them.
The rebel side is treated with equal irreverence, as we watch Mellish get food supplies for his army by entering a takeout and delivering a very long order. The CIA is also mocked in a scene where the officials decide that half the army should fight for the government and half for the rebels.
In spite of their ineptness, the rebels win out, and the president is last seen fleeing the country and wrangling about the rates for a single room hotel reservation. Mellish is keen to go home, but as so often in revolutions we discover that the winning side is just as bad as the old regime. After he has finished shooting members of the old guard, the leader refuses to hold elections and introduces a range of silly laws:
From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now 16 years old.
"What's the Spanish word for straitjacket?" Melling asks. Melling is obliged to take over as the leader instead. However his new government is broke, and he has to travel to America in an obviously fake beard to ask for money, and hope nobody recognises him. His attempts founder when his public speeches have a bad habit of drawing attention to his country's worst parts – locusts, hernias and loose women.
Worse still he is recognised by the government and arrested as a subversive. The trial scene once more owes a debt to the Marx Brothers and mocks the solemnity of courtrooms. Witnesses against Mellish include J Edgar Hoover supposedly dressed as a black woman (Hoover's transvestism was not known at this point), and Miss World who very badly sings a song. Mellish cross-examines himself before being bound and gagged.
Found guilty, Mellish has his sentence suspended. By this time he has met Nancy again who is more impressed by him now that he has been a world leader, and the two get married. The film ends with another sporting event, this time the consummation of their marriage, which is presented as if it was a boxing match. The couple argue, but make up with a kiss. Their future is uncertain. "They may live happily ever after. Again, they may not," intones the reporter.
As can be seen from the summary, there is a distaste for politics in the film. Allen does not heavily come down on either side, but rather suggests that all political stances are crazy and worthy of being mocked.
Before I close this essay, I wish to consider a couple of other points about Woody Allen. Thanks to media saturation of sex scandals, it has become hard to separate the moviemaker from the man. Woody Allen was an immensely popular director for many years, and films like Bananas were guaranteed a regular showing on television.
The train came off the rails in 1992 when Woody Allen ended his 12-year relationship with Mia Farrow, and entered a relationship with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn. While Previn was an adult at the time, the age gap and her relationship to Farrow caused many to judge Allen harshly.
Worse followed when his adoptive daughter, Dylan Farrow, accused Allen of abusing her when she was seven. These accusations turned many more people against Allen, and caused many actors and admirers to disown his movies. It is now harder to find his movies on television, or in shops and libraries.
Personally I have mixed feelings about the allegations. I would not wish for abuse allegations to be passed over lightly, or for the accuser to be closed down, as happened in the past. Set against this, justice and fair-mindedness compels me to point out that the accusations have never been proven, and the results of legal courts have been replaced by trial by media.
It has become hard to separate Allen's art from his personal life because his work is heavily autobiographical, and people have gone through his work with a fine toothcomb looking for evidence of inappropriate attitudes to women and minors, or specious justifications for immoral behaviour.
In the circumstances it is hard not to look at Bananas, and wonder if any of these attributes can be found here. We can certainly see that Allen is obsessed with sex. There is the scene with the porn magazines, and at another point he jokes that he wants a job donating sperm.
We can detect some sexism in his attitudes. The women in the movie are there for Mellish to lust over. Nancy is not especially bright, and witness the moment when a worried Mellish asks her if she into Women's Lib. Later Mellish meets a female guerrilla, and there are jokes about sucking snake poison from her breast.
For people who are determined that Allen is guilty, such humour will seem icky, but it is essentially the standard sexism that was common in the 1970s. That is not to excuse it. The 70s was a period when sexual harassment was common, and I suspect that the abuse of women made it easier for children to be abused as well. If you can get away with one, then why not the other?
However there is nothing exceptionally awful in the way that Allen portrays sex or women. In other movies he has created many sympathetic female characters, and a preoccupation with sex is hardly a rarity, especially given its potential for comedy.
What of Allen's other propensity, that of including self-justifications for his behaviour? There is a little bit of this. Fielding Mellish is clumsy, lustful and cowardly, but somehow these qualities seem heroic in a topsy-turvy world where courage and idealism bring death and destruction. In any case, Mellish's faults are offset by his intellect and wit which will always allow him to bed any women that he likes.
Overall there is not a lot to judge Allen too harshly on in Bananas. At some point, I will review more of his films, and see how these sit with me. Like many comedies, the humour in Bananas is hit-and-miss, but the jokes come thick and fast, and there are enough to make it a hugely entertaining comedy.
Bannas Woody Allen What's the Spanish Word for
Source: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2018/02/24/bananas-1971/