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Rating: Second film made by Woody Allen, year 1971.
The film is a satire of a revolution in an imaginary Latin American country. In those years, this type of insurgency was actually happening in many Latin American countries. It was also the period of the Vietnam War. Allen is a progressive democrat, not very politicized and fundamentally against the war. Making light of such a delicate current topic was certainly not an easy initiative.
At the beginning of the film, the ironic comments on American influence in other countries, particularly in Latin America, should be highlighted. Amidst the crowd gathered outside the Bananas parliament building, a guy makes his way through the masses claiming to be an American TV representative. Allen wants to underline the enormous, sometimes excessive power of television. The presence of such a powerful medium embedded in the life of the average American leads to the flattening of thought, but paradoxically helps stability. American influence is essentially driven by forms of entertainment that advertise a functional, solid system characterized by well-being. It is a strong message that establishes the binomial TV-progress or rather media-information. Television is a metaphor for "spreading culture" or, if you prefer, subculture, but formally it predisposes the creation of a cultural layer, a collective identity (or a non-identity). It is a strong criticism of the "backwards" and unstable regime-systems of Latin American countries, and at the same time a way to comfort American identity in its decadent form, yet far from coups and popular uprisings.
In this film, rich in personal style, Allen feels more confident as a director and works a lot on the effect of speed to establish a fundamental rule regarding comedies: a comic scene is never fast enough. Speed is still one of the distinctive features of Allen's films. Although dense in terms of content, they have very tight rhythms and are very short (Zelig lasts only 1 hour and a quarter). For Allen, duration is instinctive, respecting almost the biological and natural rhythm of the director.
In "Bananas," Allen is concerned with making people laugh as the main goal and giving the film dynamism, so much so that some scenes almost resemble cartoons (see the scenes in the rebel camp). Furthermore, in Allen's films, no one really dies or bleeds, and as in cartoons, many parts are not narrated, the story proceeds in great leaps. At the end of the film, Allen turns to the audience with an ironic observation to "another part of the world": a character quotes Kierkegaarde and says "Scandinavians seem to have an instinctive understanding of the human condition," and subsequently, Swedish is proclaimed the new official language of the republic of Bananas. Here, Allen's marked sympathy for Scandinavia (and particularly for Sweden) is evident, having a long-standing interest in Swedish cinema.
The American director's irony convinces and surprises with incredible ideas. The story develops around the passion for a woman, which will push the character played by Allen himself to revolutionize his own existence. One should remember the bizarre hotel room scene where Allen discovers a musician performing inside the wardrobe. It is all paradoxical even for the spectator who follows the music as a background to the scene while the character, suspicious, investigates the source of the sound until discovering the unexpected guest in the wardrobe!
A touch of masterful comedy.
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