Screenshot
By Andrea Thompson
To watch Cheryl Dunye's 1996 masterpiece “The Watermelon Woman” is to notice something new and engaging every time. Cheryl Dunye, who was the first Black lesbian to direct a film, also wrote, edited, and plays the lead, but if there's a further thing from a vanity picture, then I don't know it. In fact, the first time I watched it, I had no idea so much of it was fiction.
Even if you knew nothing about the background of “The Watermelon Woman,” it's clearly a very personal film. Dunye even plays a fictionalized version of herself, an aspiring filmmaker who documents her search for an actress who played a number of stereotypical 'mammy' roles in the 1930s and was mostly credited as 'The Watermelon Woman.' As Cheryl delves deeper into The Watermelon Woman's history, she discovers her name was Fae Richards (Lisa Marie Bronson) and that she was also “in the family,” aka queer.
Just how Cheryl goes about this research in a pre-Internet world is only one of the many, many ways this film sends out the serious 90s vibes. Well, that and the outfits, especially what some people thought were so damn edgy. Cheryl not only uses human sources (such as her own mother, who basically plays herself) for much of her information, she actually works in a video store, complete with actual VHS tapes to rent. It's enough to bring early Tarantino to mind, a filmmaker who was also known for working in a video store and made a film led by a Black woman the following year.
Screenshot
Screenshot
Needless to say, the similarities pretty much end there. While Tarantino has gone on to have a big enough career to be able to bitch and moan about how cruel the industry is to old white men, Cheryl Dunye's work is lesser-known, shall we say, although more recently she's become rediscovered enough for “The Watermelon Woman” to get a 20th anniversary restoration and a theatrical rerelease, and for Dunye herself to become a prolific TV director. This is in spite of her film not only including elements that have only become mainstream relatively recently, from the film's genre, which is a kind of meta docu-fiction, to the many issues she raises, from white feminism to the erasure of Black history.
“The Watermelon Woman” is meta on a level few films have been able to pull off. Dunye ended up having to create much of the limited history her fictional counterpart is able to discover, which in reality was either nonexistent or beyond the film's budget. Cheryl's own involvement with Diana (Guinevere Turner), a white patron at the video store, also begins around the time she discovers Fae was romantically involved with Martha Page, a white woman who directed many of the films Richards acted in, and who was played by Dunye's real-life partner at the time, Alexandra Juhasz.
Cheryl's own disillusionment with Diana also parallels a few revelations about the nature of Fae and Martha's relationship, much of which acts a brutal rebuke of white feminism, with many of the white women ranging from racist to well-meaning, or just outright tone-deaf. That said, Diana and Cheryl's involvement is the reason for one of the best lesbian sex scenes ever filmed, even if it did cause a backlash that involved criticism of the funding it received from the National Endowment of the Arts. Hell, Cheryl even gets harassed by the police in one scene, who refuse to believe she didn't steal the camera she's using to film, and even call her boy. This kind of behavior is apparently so normal to her that the film never even mentions it again.
Screenshot
The more Cheryl discovers about Fae, the more “The Watermelon Woman” becomes a moving tribute to those history ignored or actively silenced. In such cases, the film is very aware that the lives of the people who did manage to create will always be a mystery to a certain extent, but the film refuses to reduce any of its subjects to mere victims, with footage of Fae and June (Cheryl Clarke), the woman who became the Fae's great love, that speaks of a happy life lived in spite of dreams which remained forever deferred.
