Learn the Teaches of Peaches with PEACHES GOES BANANAS

There are two films that follow queer Canadian performance art icon Peaches through her 2022 Teaches of Peaches anniversary tour, but only one of them captures her outrageous yet sweet essence. With her latest portrait doc, Peaches Goes Bananas, Marie Losier, who has turned her camera on unorthodox artists like Guy Maddin and Genesis P-Orridge throughout her career, brings out the hypersexual artist’s more domestic side without losing any of her flare. This laid-back work is fairly standard for Losier in both style and substance–– that is to say, entertaining and surrealistic, pairing long stretches of gauzily shot verité with whimsically stylized portraiture–– but for a filmmaker with such a distinct and engaging MO, this isn’t all that much of a drawback. Just because someone can do something in their sleep doesn’t mean you don’t like hearing about their dreams. 

Though best known for her raunchy, supremely danceable pop-punk discography–– she calls her style “electrocrap”–– and in-your-face stage presence, Meryll Nisker, who has gone by Peaches after a character in Nina Simone’s “Four Women” since the late ‘90s, is a jack of all trades. One of the first women to have her bust immortalized by groupie legend Cynthia Plaster Caster, she’s often associated with feminist artists like the Guerilla Girls and Yoko Ono while also bridging genre divides, performing alongside everyone from Iggy Pop to Marilyn Manson to M.I.A.. She’s appeared in a similarly diverse swath of media, a fact reflected in Peaches Goes Bananas: her classic “Fuck the Pain Away,” for example, has played over pranks in Jackass Number 2 (2010) as well as on the catwalk for both Prada and Givenchy. She’s also written two plays, Peaches Christ Superstar and Peaches Does Herself, and, as we see in Losier’s film, has starred in two operas, L’Orfeo and The Seven Deadly Sins. One thing this film makes clear for those who may only know the singer for songs like “Lovertits” and “Fatherfucker”–– Peaches has the range. 

Peaches Goes Bananas, while technically following a single tour, also draws out the artist’s wide range of influences. Most interestingly, Losier traces her start as a folksy, tot-singalong-leader-for-hire at Jewish daycare centers (the timbre of this footage inadvertently echoes Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc’s Adventures in Plastic [2001]). “I learned how to negotiate audiences from those kids,” she snarks, not unseriously, in the film, “when kids are bored, they’ll just run up, pull your hair, stick your fingers up your nose, they don’t care. It’s like a punk audience.” Above all else, this playful, childlike approach to every aspect of her life is the most enjoyable element of this portrait film, on display in her enthusiastic embrace of aging and her warm relationship to her sister, whose struggles with M.S. are a central throughline, as well as in her David–Byrne-cum-John–Waters approach to performance: her concerts, which make up much of the film’s slim runtime, are bubblegum cavalcades of stuffed-vulva headdresses, flowing merkin wigs, and giant condom balloons that feel, somehow, like if Weird Al did burlesque. Interspersed throughout are portrait shots meant to capture that same spirit: Peaches chatting with her parents in Toronto with a plastic fish on her head; Peaches, topless, whipping a thick chain around her neck like a bodybuilder; Peaches devouring a banquet’s worth of pastel-colored desserts with her hands. 

If this sounds pleasant, it certainly is. This is a gentle, flowy, entertaining doc with its heart in the right place and plenty to enjoy along the way. At the end of the day, unlike the artist it depicts, this film may not be groundbreaking–– but, still, who wouldn’t want to spend seventy-nine minutes playing with Peaches?