Fake Fruit Factory is a 1986 short documentary film (22 minutes) by Chick Strand.
It is a portrait of women in a Mexican factory which makes papier-mâché fruit. The women labor carefully, taking papier-mâché molds out of glue vats, drying them, and then meticulously painting them to resemble watermelons or bell peppers or whatever. The factory is managed by a white American who has a Mexican wife.
As the women work, they chat. Surprisingly, at least from what the documentary shows, they spend most of their time talking about sex. Topics include how well their boyfriends are endowed and how much the manager and his wife are having sex. When the ladies of the factory go on a little picnic by a pool and are joined by the manager's handsome cousin Jimmy, they talk a lot about him.
Tropes:
- All Women Are Lustful: Or so one would think from this film, as the women never talk about anything but sex.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's a fake fruit factory.
- Extreme Close-Up: With only a couple of exceptions, the whole movie is a series of extreme close-ups. For the factory sequence, that means that the camera spends most of its time taking extreme close-ups of the women's hands as they make their fake fruit. It gets a little stranger during the picnic segment, when the camera spends a lot of its time tightly focused on the breasts and crotches of the swimsuit-clad women.
- Food Porn: The fish tacos that the women make for lunch look mouth-watering.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: The Anglo manager doubtless caught the word "sexo" being tossed around constantly, but he probably didn't know that the women in the factory were discussing how much he bonks his wife.
- Jitter Cam: Seen briefly when one of the workers is toting some unfinished fake fruit on her head.
- Male Gaze: Chick Strand was a woman, but this may be what the Extreme Close Ups of the bikini-clad women at the picnic is meant to evoke.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: One of the few shots in the movie that isn't an Extreme Close-Up is the last shot, in which a van trundles away with the ladies from the factory.
- Teeny Weenie: The women commiserate with one of their own, whose boyfriend/husband apparently has a less-than-impressive member."But he is made too small!"
"It doesn't matter. So his sausage is little."
"You say he has a funny little sausage?"
"Yeah, he could pass for a pig."
"It isn't even round! It's flat!" - "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Titles at the end of the film reveal that just two weeks after Strand finished filming (somehow, she took four years to make a 22-minute movie), the manager ran off with a white woman, a Vegas blackjack dealer. His ex-wife took control of the factory and made herself rich.
