Bye Bye Monkey

Director Marco Ferreri's Bye Bye Monkey was in the DVD player last night. I watched this 1978 dark comedy with the remote in hand and a quick finger on the pause button. The sweeping views of Tribeca and Lower Manhattan are amazing. A billboard that reads "Apartments Available" is planted opposite the still elevated west side highway that ran along the future Battery Park City. In the movie, a deflated King Kong lies in the middle of a sand field, but what is now Battery Park City. From the sand field are full views of the World Trade Center, the Verizon building pictured here on the movie poster, The Woolworth tower still dominates the City Hall area and very little of the skyline exists that we see now.

Other more intimate street views are the row houses on Harrison Street at Greenwich. These were boarded up at this time, but a few were used as the Roman Empyre Wax Museum as featured in the movie. Gerard Depardieu playes Lafayette, who adopts a baby monkey found in the hands of King Kong. He lives a few blocks at Hubert and Collister and walks, rides his bike through the streets. It's great to see how unpopulated our area was and what structures are still here. Another great scene was from the balcony of an upper floor apartment in the Mitchell-Lama apartments. The camera looks out and over for a sweeping view of everything South of Duane street.

At one point Lafayette rides his bike from the row houses along Greenwich and around the corner where Bazzini used to be and then down the Staple St. alleyway and walks into a theater from a doorway under that overwalk. Another point he is riding his bike along Duane St. Park and takes a left onto Hudson. He stops there and gets some baked goods at a bakery. I believe all of the exterior shots were what existed at the time. I wish there still was a bakery there.

The overall movie storyline is a bit strange and disconnected. The dialogue, the baby monkey, Lafayette and his whistle antics, I'm sure everything "means" something. But Bye Bye Monkey is either really 'artsy' and over my head,, or just one silly episode followed by another. I'm certainly not going to try and figure out what the movie is trying to 'say'. I'll just accept it at face value and for me, to travel around the streets of mid 70's Tribeca is surreally priceless.

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