Banana Split

Vertical Entertainment | Release Date (Streaming): March 27, 2020

4.9	USER SCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 7 Ratings

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hnestlyontheslyAug 27, 2020

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. I went looking for this movie early last month (it’s now June 30th) because I was hoping to find something that would fill the Booksmart-sized hole in my heart. The premise is a clever spin on the high school romcom formula: best friends April and Nick, played by a luxuriously coiffed Cole Sprouse and screenplay writer Hannah Marks, fall in love in the final year of school, fall out of love in the summer of their college, and Clara, played by Liana Liberato, starts dating Nick. The erotic triangle that emerges expertly sets up the tensions of female friendship forged from the trauma of a common romantic interest, and the movie’s turn in the third act, Nick’s pining for April, sets up multiple points of tension in this ticking time bomb of a movie.

The premise, as I said, is fire. In fact, the acceleration of time in the first act, Nick and April’s early love and its slow decay portrayed through a series of vignettes parodies what other romcoms spend their entire plot time on. Instead of that single set of arcs, we’re positioned in a more privileged, more jaded perspective of the outcomes of high school romance. For our protagonists, the tension is still real, their emotions are elevated, but the stakes are measured in a way that makes the possibility of April and Clara’s friendship (and its eventual loss) feel a lot more poignant than the romantic prospects with Nick. The movie even finds a way to make Ben, Clara’s cousin, a fully-realized character rather than a plot point for uniting the two girls. His anxiety about withholding information from Nick and his resentment towards the girls for their own machinations builds over the course of the movie, as the emotional depth of his silence as their relationship deepens changes the tenor of his actions. His reality kind of sneaks up on you in a way that feels earned and surprising, like the best friend story arc in Blinded by the Light from last year.

Banana Split tries to keep a lot of plates spinning at the same time: both girls are navigating their own feelings about Nick, for April, it’s about the unrequited love she feels as a spurned lover, and for April, it’s about the guilt she feels as her relationship with Nick blossoms over the course of the summer. The two girls–I wish I had someone who could give me more perspective about this, so please send me some feedback on this if I’m on to anything–have a thing going on where Clara is coded as femme, wearing dresses to parties, sports bras on their runs, whereas April is–not? It’s not exactly that she’s playing a tomboy, but she clearly sees something in Clara that she is both threatened and intrigued by, not because she wants to emulate it, but because she wants to acquire it as a complement to herself. Their discussion about the number of sexual partners they’ve had seems to be a part of the mismatch between them, but I’m not entirely sure what–or if–archetype April represents, except that she’s a little bit mean-spirited at times and more introverted.

My notes tell me there’s a “Kobe” joke early on in the movie that indicates the film suffered from some untimely editing, and the fact that literally no one wears seatbelts in this movie was sort of insane. I’m always interested in the way that parties are updated for the time period–I feel like you can tell a lot about the ethos of a filmmaker and his or her feelings about class and the pressures of growing up by the way that they portray (or don’t) big high school house parties. This movie has no pretenses about its status as a very elite cross section of a cross section by offering up coke and alcohol at various points.

Delightful hat trick by the star and writer Liberato on this one. Worth coming back to. https://honestlyonthesly.wordpress.com/2020/05/07/banana-split-may-7/… Expand

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