Helena Solberg unmasks a Brazilian idol.

• Author: Terrell, Nena
• Position: Filmmaker; actress Carmen Miranda

From the opening sequences of her latest documentary, Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business - showing the massive street crowds at Miranda's 1955 funeral, accorded all the pomp and circumstance usually reserved for a head of state - director Helena Solberg engages her audience with the emotion and wonder Miranda's life story provokes.

It has been Solberg's professional quest to examine the social, historical, and cultural influences that shape the lives of ordinary people and the choices they make when confronted by them. By doing so, she brings a human perspective to the contemporary issues of our time. Those who have followed Solberg's body of award-winning documentaries - from her first film, Emerging Woman, in the 1970s, to The Double Day (which opened the 1975 UN International Women's Conference in Mexico), and Simplemente Jenny (which explores the impact of the media on a Latin American girl's self image) - may be surprised that she chose Miranda for her latest investigative venture. After all, Miranda is a frivolous icon whose image created much embarrassment to Brazilians and other Latin Americans.

Yet, with Bananas, Solberg has once again touched a nerve. Her exploration of the Miranda story has moved critics from media as diverse as the New York Times, the Village Voice, and "Entertainment Tonight" to reflect on the current issues of multiculturalism, and at the Estado de Sao Paulo and Jornal do Brasil, to examine the national psyche.

The documentary had its world premiere at the 27th Brasilia Film Festival in December 1994, where it won the Audience Award for Best Film, the Special Jury Prize, and the Film Critics' Award. In the U.S., it premiered in New York at the Film Forum and has been televised nationally by the Public Broadcasting Service. It has garnered more prizes and critical acclaim at festivals in Chicago, Locarno, Toronto, Melbourne, Yamagata, and London, and closed the year in Havana.

Born Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha in a village in northern Portugal, Carmen Miranda, dubbed the "Queen of Samba" in Brazil, was the first white entertainer to adapt the Afro-Brazilian costume of the Bahiana and samba herself all the way to Broadway and Hollywood superstardom. (A generation later, Elvis Presley would have an equivalent impact in the U.S., and, in a remarkable parallel, his career and life would mirror events in Miranda's own.) In 1945 Miranda was the highest paid female entertainer In the U.S. Yet the pressures of overnight fame and riches took their toll. In her later years, Miranda became a pitiful caricature of herself, and at the age of forty-six she succumbed to pills and alcohol, a singing canary trapped in a golden Hollywood cage.

The first Hollywood film in which Miranda appears as a singer, Down Argentine Way, provoked riots in Buenos Aires in 1940. This was the debut of Miranda's role as the "muse" of the "good neighbor policy" and how she came to represent, for better or worse, not only Brazil but all of Latin America as well, according to Raul Smandek, a Brazilian diplomat of the...