Roseanne Liang is a Banana in a Nutshell: a Chinese woman in love for the last eight years with a white New Zealander. TZE MING MOK peels back the cross-cultural skin of this local doco.


THE ACRONYM for Banana in a Nutshell, BiaN, is unintentionally fitting. Some meanings of bian in Mandarin are:

1. discrimination or the act of distinguishing difference ()
2. a side, or an indication of place and sides ()
3. a whip or ancient Chinese iron fighting-staff ()
4. an argument ()
5. change ().

BiaN is the classic story of a wayward child struggling against her conservative migrant parents. Film-maker Roseanne Liang, already frowned upon by her parents for her unconventional choice of occupation, is truly in the dogbox for having a white boyfriend. How will she reconcile her heart and her hearth, her choices and her culture? It's a tale of forbidden love, threats of disownment, of living at home until marriage, all building up to a showdown between the two men she loves most in the world... a story so classic that a non-Chinese viewer could be misled into thinking that it is a ubiquitous one in our 'community', even in this time and place. Not so. The parental Liangs are a throwback to the previous generation, and their attitudes will probably be seen as extreme and retrograde by the Chinese people who see this film, both here and abroad. Roseanne in fact seems to be living my mother's life. But instead of secretly getting married and emigrating to more liberal climes like my mother did, she has instead made a charming guerrilla documentary. This documentary doesn't just charm, it uses charm. It brandishes charm like a weapon, though its grip and the set of its jaw, is shaky. It seems like nerves. Perhaps the documentary is hoping to work as well on the documentary-maker's parents as it does on the audience.

: discrimination
Finding it intolerable that Roseanne's longstanding partner Stephen is white, her father has made their marriage conditional on Stephen's mastery of basic Mandarin. Stephen himself notes that this is hardly Jacob's seven years of toil, and that his lessons in the language are in fact, beneficial. But this demand is merely the tipping point, the final straw that spurred Roseanne into picking up the handicam and showing the country how at the age of 27, her life is still, in many ways, that of a cloistered teenager. How her parents' prejudices have caused anguish throughout the family. And how, despite being firmly knotted together by the apron-strings, she and her parents are as achingly distant from each other as it is possible to be while living under one roof.

: taking sides
As the Film Festival programme says, BiaN "could hardly be more appealingly one-sided or more generously self-centred." Told mostly through Roseanne's voiceover, quirky-cute reconstructions, and direct confessional to camera, she strikes out for a kind of lightness that holds exasperation, trauma, grief and fury at bay. The line wavers. Meanwhile, her parents dominate the film by maintaining an extraordinary absence, their faces unseen except through the occasional photograph, their footsteps and voices unheard. The silence denoting the fearsome Dr Allen Liang's side of an unheard phone conversation strains beneath the weight of a guillotine. I've written previously: "Can we get a Chinese film made with no parents in it, please?" I didn't mean this.
As the charm and lightness rub away, the documentary's most compelling feature emerges – Roseanne's ambivalence. As Roseanne attacks her parents, Stephen defends them. When Stephen questions why she stays in her parents' house, she rehabilitates them. In the fraught few weeks captured in BiaN, Roseanne only knows that she doesn't know where she stands. That's why she can't leave. Never ask Roseanne Liang to invade Iraq for you. But her Iraq war documentary, now that would be a must-see.

: weaponry
In the Liangs' courtly struggle of procedure and protocol, Dr Liang is armed with an ancient iron silence, easily overpowering Roseanne's frenetic, modern tongue-lashing. The more Roseanne babbles, the more she incriminates herself, and the more she knows it. The more her parents are absent from the picture, the stronger they become. The viewer begins forming an impression of Dr Allen Liang as a stony, silent, ancient warrior. Or, as Roseanne puts it, as Bruce Lee fighting Kareem Abdul Jabbar in Game of Death – short but speedy. How can she compete with this?

: argument
Roseanne doesn't have it all figured out – she is still sounding her way through her own story. But BiaN is more than just a diary-entry or a therapy session. In the classic mold to which it adheres, there is a cross-cultural conflict at the core of BiaN which can only be bridged by love. But that conflict is not between Pakeha Stephen and the Chinese Liangs: it is between Roseanne and her own parents. In Chinese culture the tradition of displacing direct emotional communication onto symbolic acts is strong. Untraditional she may claim to be, but Roseanne Liang has made this documentary in lieu of a screaming-match. It's an attempt to contain an argument inside the parameters of a video sound-balance. To turn down the volume, and hear voices that haven't been heard before. This has worked both ways. With the absence of her parents' own voices, she argues with herself on their behalf.

: change
If this documentary is self-indulgent, it is allowed to be. It would not have necessarily gained anything from a dispassionate treatment. As the first volley in a conversation that has yet to truly start, it is certainly the most honest challenge on film to be thrown out from our generation to the last in this backwoods branch of the diaspora What will come of it? The drama, again, will all happen offscreen. Will the Liangs remain silent? Will they make a counterdocumentary? Whether they speak on the matter or not, they will surely, with the rest of the audience, understand that this is not just an artefact of self-obsession, but a monument to love.