Review #919 - Bananas (1971)
THE SCOOP
Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos Montalbán
Plot: When a bumbling New Yorker is dumped by his activist girlfriend, he travels to a tiny Latin American nation and becomes involved in its latest rebellion.
Genre: Comedy
Awards: -
Runtime: 82min
Rating: PG for comic sexuality including some pin-up nudity, some drug use and crude language.
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
“I object, your honor! This
trial is a travesty. It's a travesty of
a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”
Early
Woody Allen movies have been synonymous with an addictive blend of visual
comedy of the slapstick kind and witty verbiage of the absurdist kind. Bananas,
his third feature, is a strong example of this quality that continues to
permeate through some of his works, though since the late 1970s he has become
more mature as a filmmaker as he complements his neurotic, psycho-intellectual
style of dialogue writing with a focus on dramatic acting and emotionally
resonant plotting.
Bananas is a light-hearted ridiculous gem
of a movie. It is tremendously
energetic, partly due to a rhythmic Mexican/Cuban-flavoured jazzy score by Marvin Hamlisch.
Allen directs himself and a group of
actors willing to indulge in this sort of comedy. He plays Fielding Mellish, a product tester
who falls in love with a woman political activist called Nancy (Louise Lasser),
and then inexplicably finds himself part of a rebel group hell-bent on
overthrowing a dictatorship of a small South American country when she dumps
him.
The
plotting is straightforward yet doesn't make any logical sense as Fielding
jumps from one comedy set-piece to another.
Some gags are superfluous like Allen's character visiting his surgeon
parents while they are operating on a clueless, conscious man, but there are some
truly hilarious sequences, in particular the courtroom scenes in the climax,
and an attempted mugging of a man gone bizarrely wrong.
Allen's
handling of farce is commendable and he comes across as an entertainer who
enjoys milking as much laughter from audiences as possible. Bananas
remains to be rarely seen in comparison to his more acclaimed films such as Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979) and Match Point
(2005), but like Sleeper (1973) it is
one of his purest comedies that showcases Allen as a likable funnyman who
builds an accessible persona without being pretentious.
Critic
Geoff Andrew of Time Out calls Bananas
“wonderfully incoherent”, and that is very much spot-on. Allen’s movies get more complex and less
slapstick later, so this ought to be seen as a treasured early effort by one of
the great American filmmakers of all-time.
GRADE: B+
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