Reviewed Joe Sheppard

Banana in a Nutshell
REVIEWED BY JOE SHEPPARD
Banana in a NutshellDirected by Roseanne LiangFilm Festival; watch out for further release dates coming soonReviewed by Joe SheppardDespite what the title may suggest, Roseanne Liang’s Banana in a Nutshell is not a culinary-themed skin flick, nor does it have anything in common with Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell series. BiaN is a welcome contribution to that good old New Zealand theme of identity – both personal and national – but it’s also about communicating with loved ones when your own ideas about who you should be come from a different world to theirs.Well, a different hemisphere, at least. Liang’s parents are first-generation New Zealanders who moved to Auckland from Hong Kong before she was born. They are also very conservative by New Zealand standards, and keen to maintain links to their Chinese heritage. In recent years, however, Liang has found herself becoming increasingly estranged from her parents, as her experiences in New Zealand have meant that she craves a Western-style relationship with them, complete with affection, understanding and dialogue – a relationship that she begins to fear she may never achieve. The issue is crystallised in the form of Liang’s very tall and long-suffering boyfriend Stephen Harris, an absolute angel, who is made to jump through all sorts of hoops just to get any acknowledgement from the very people he is determined to make future parents-in-law out of. The hypocrisy of Liang’s parents reaches its maleficent peak when they tell Harris that he must learn how to speak, read and write Chinese – even though Liang’s Chinese-New Zealand brother-in-law can’t speak a word himself. What else, short of eye surgery and skin pigmentation, are they going to impose upon him? And why should that even be desirable?The home-video quality close-ups of teary confessions might have given BiaN a resemblance to The Blair Witch Project, but it was festival colleague Czech Dream – where the directors film a serious of stunts to enlighten their blinkered audience – that was closer in form and ambition. Come question time after the film, the most important function of BiaN was revealed to be not entertaining a general audience, but rather persuading a specific two: Mum and Dad. In learning to communicate with a tiny audience that appears to be prima facie alien and sympathetic, Liang has honed her pen and camera to make what really is an essay more than a documentary – lots of anecdotes and editorialising, but always with a view to defending her thesis. It’s nice, then, that everyone else at the theatre seemed to enjoy the film too, and I think BiaN worked well on both levels.Thankfully, I only ever had to learn Cantonese through Wayne’s World. In a nutshell? Zang!

http://www.salient.org.nz/index.php?a=1773&c=31