In 2010, we saw Bananas!*, Swedish documentarist Fredrik Gertten's chronicle of the efforts of Nicaraguan fruit pickers to bring a class action lawsuit against the Dole corporation for using toxic pesticides that had resulted in cases of sterility and cancer among the workforce. The film was laudably clear-eyed in showing how the case would eventually turn on the personality and ethics of the lawyer the fruit pickers had hired to represent their cause in the U.S.: the flamboyant Juan Jose Domínguez, seen cruising around Los Angeles in his sports car and wondering how best to get his face on the back of more buses, whom the Dole legal team accused of filing false claims - entirely wrongly, as events turned out.
The asterisk in the title was a signifier this story was ongoing, provisional; even as the print of Bananas!* was being locked, Gertten was receiving his first letters from Dole themselves, threatening legal action if his film restated any of the claims the fruit pickers and their lawyers had made. Matters came to a head over a frantic few days at the Los Angeles Film Festival in late 2009, where organisers pulled the film from official competition at the last minute, and then only reluctantly reinstated it. Eventually, Bananas!* would be shown in the most strained of circumstances, with the Festival's executive director being obliged to read out a statement from Dole (in front of Gertten, present for a post-film Q&A) which reframed the film as a lesson in how not to make a truthful documentary - the beginnings of a smear campaign that became increasingly personal, and went on for a full eighteen months.
Shrewdly, Gertten kept his cameras rolling throughout that time, and watched on - sometimes amused, sometimes horrified, often exhausted - as the Bananas!* project mutated from an exploitation story into a freedom-of-speech story; as the documentarist rather reluctantly shrugs in this week's docu-sequel, Big Boys Gone Bananas!*, "we've become part of our own film". This new work, which proceeds from the absurdity of a company who hadn't seen a film trying to stop others from seeing what was in said film, sees on one side language (and, more specifically, those derogatory terms - "fraudulent", "defamatory", "irresponsible" - being applied to Gertten) and, on the other, the selective silence of the American media, who proved suspiciously content to validate Dole's painting of this filmmaker as upstart Eurotrash badmouthing the fine institution that puts pineapple on our breakfast tables. This, in turn, led Gertten to start investigating the dubious links between a newly scared press, the corporations who provide them with their remaining ad revenue, and the "strategic communications" agencies the latter hire to do all their dirty work for them.
The result is one of those documentaries that prove vaguely frustrating, even infuriating, in their laying out of a very modern tangle. As the threats and lawsuits eke their way through the system, one senses Gertten having to cast around to come up with funny, pertinent material, if for no other reason than to keep his spirits up: there's an endearing cameo from the head of a Swedish fast-food chain, who refers to his customers as "guests" and is filmed wearing the same smock as his frontline serving staff. Big Boys!* is knottier than the original film, and that knottiness is in itself revealing about the way corporations have of asserting their dominance: principally by setting their critics to arguing (and to spending time, money and energy arguing) about details that don't, in the bigger picture, matter. I shan't give away the outcome, but it's only in the film's final moments that Gertten feels he can return to the Nicaraguan workers, who remain struggling and underpaid - those of them who aren't already in the ground, at any rate. Dole, in attempting to suppress these films, wants you to forget about them, and their claims. Gertten, in going to these lengths to tell their story, evidently does not.
Big Boys Gone Bananas!* opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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