The Watermelon Woman (1996)

 

Director: Cheryl Dunye

Screenplay: Cheryl Dunye (with Douglas McKeown)

Cast: Cheryl Dunye as Cheryl; Guinevere Turner as Diana; Valarie Walker as Tamara; Lisa Marie Bronson as Fae 'The Watermelon Woman' Richards; Cheryl Clarke as June Walker (as Cheryl Clark); Irene Dunye as Irene Dunye; Brian Freeman as Lee Edwards; Ira Jeffries as Shirley Hamilton; Alexandra Juhasz as Martha Page

Ephemeral Waves

 

It is a question to ask even if crass, but how should a white heterosexual male like myself approach reviewing a film by a lesbian black filmmaker, especially in mind to the point of the film being about the lack of representation for someone like Cheryl Dunye, attempting to deal with this subject which even decades after the film was released is still a concern in terms of representation? By admitting this immediately, to be honest, an outsider who wanted to see this film for years and comes to what is Cheryl Dunye effectively playing herself. This is a tale where, as a struggling filmmaker who becomes obsessed with a reoccurring African American actress in old thirties films, she will reach the point she has to tell the stories of gay black women like herself and this actress, even if she ends the film by herself having decided to focus on what morally is more important to her. Even if it means sacrificing a romantic life, even if it means being argumentative with people and confrontational on the lack of representation, and even if it means a schism with her outspoken friend Tamara (Valarie Walker).

Cheryl works in a video rental store, with side work filming weddings on the side, searching through old thirties and forties films until she encounters a Southern plantation melodrama and a mysterious figure known as "the watermelon woman", an unaccredited African American actress in a minor role who she becomes emotionally attached to. Wishing to know even her real name, this woman becomes the mystery we follow through to learn of as a real person. The mysterious woman, and the film she stars in is fake, the film existing in a world where "Fae Richards exists", the figure whom Cheryl will come to know her as and the existential journey that follows throughout the whole film, stemming from an unnamed black actress playing the stereotype of a "mammy" maid figure to finding the real woman, an openly gay black woman who worked in nightclubs as a singer and lived a life beyond one film. Even as a fictional figure, in a nineties film, she represents a voice of a minority lost and needing to be pierced together from a slog of hard work to represent. Whilst the film is of its era of the nineties, this is pretty ahead of its time of critically uncovering and representing voices unheard from, something that would come far more, especially for non-white hetero male voices, in the decades after.

It is admittedly part of the film too, adding an amusement, to look at how nineties said film is too. I am not even referring to the way the film looks, a low budget film with a zippy aesthetic of the era, but just the content onscreen. A reference, in this era of growing numbers of indie productions, to Spike Lee appears for a joke for example, specifically School Daze (1988) where someone Cheryl is stuck with in a double date tried to get an audition by singing terribly. (She then proceeds to try Lovin' You by Minnie Riperton, the song with the heighted vocal pitch required to sing parts of to emphasis this). Having to explain what a videotape rental store is to a younger viewer, and I just missed this era myself, is going to be something to raise too, as alongside the store having a shelf for David Cronenberg you have to explain you once rented reeled tape with film in plastic cases¹. Everything else has not aged at all - in fact, at this point in a decade is when I consider pop culture decided to eat itself, looking back at the 20th century and reflecting on the culture of that time even in what was adapted for Hollywood blockbusters. Here, this proved for a great purpose, as even in fictionalised form, this is referring to an earlier era of low budget films made for black audiences, black performers and black performed night clubs of the thirties and forties, and the culture for black lesbians of the time.

Here as well, Cheryl Dunye is willing to get into a much thornier take on what her own identify and others is. As herself even in a fictionalised version, feminist scholar Camille Paglia appears with a very awkward monologue about racial stereotypes. On one hand, it is striking for her to talk about the watermelon, a problematic stereotype for African Americans, in her childhood of Italian heritage being something of joy, almost something of call for African Americans to reclaim these problematic tropes in North American pop culture...except this is still a white feminist, suggesting to African Americans to scrutinise these ideas themselves and reclaim them, compromised by the sledgehammer lack of subtlety as an outsider. It is something Cheryl Dunye was more than likely hinting at its complicated form by having the sequence in the film in the first place.

Dunye   herself arguably reclaims the "mammy" image briefly, even performing a drag version full heartedly, and does openly mock whit feminism without qualm when Cheryl goes to C.L.I.T. (Centre for Lesbian Info & Technology) in New York City, a feminist archive where the black lesbian section is only two boxes, and the woman running the group, played by LGBTQ novelist and activist Sarah Schulman, is an obnoxious and overbearing person. The film is willing to get into the thornier side of people in general. Her version of Cheryl does get confrontational to an extreme, but the most extensive cases are her having to hit against people who carry a negative wall of approach - most prominently, when Fae Richards is revealed to have been dating a gay white female director, the sister of the late director lives under the view denying her sister's sexuality. Likewise, Cheryl's own life is complicated, eventually taking the noble goal, sacrificing her own wishes, for the better of representing voices like her own.

Her friend Tamara is more openly confrontational, constantly chastising Cheryl for not just trying to date and staying single in her obsession with being a film maker, and eventually shows real biases of her own, especially to people not gay black women like herself who want to date a lot. Cheryl's own romance with a white woman Diana (Guinevere Turner) is marred realising, as a bisexual woman from out-of-town, Diana is revealed is not really engaging to Cheryl emotionally, though their romance is the one aspect of the film which is arguably not as fleshed out as the other subplots. The one thing Cheryl can fall back on, in this complex place in her life, is finding who Fae Richards is. The hours taken, the distances walked and travelled, even the criticisms absorbed to improve herself by asking what the documentary in Richards is meant to be if ever finished.

Obviously, what Cheryl Dunye perceives in all these characters herself deserves priority over an interpretation. She does however not need metaphor to hide the message out in the open, representing a lost voice and those like herself in dire need of representation. This is something, ironically, which is why a film like The Watermelon Woman is both a time capsule of the time but also ahead of its time in what its themes are. One scene in the film played as awkward comedy, where Cheryl attempts to find research material in a library, demonstrates this. Another is about one piece of research she comments on in her documentary, a book on the subtext of lesbian women working in classic Hollywood, which she shows annoyance of being written by a man, but finds it more problematic how it reduces someone like Fae Richards to a brief sentence.

Saying this is a lower budget film is absurd from my context, as an amateur writer who feds himself on shot-on-video productions of far less budget, which is the one thing I can make a legitimate claim of as an outsider to this film, in how as a result this film looks ambitious and elaborate within its limited budget to a virtue.(Also contrast this to a film like Mark Rappaport's From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), one of the many projects of his from his era, including one about Rock Hudson's sexuality, which is an attempt to reclaim the life of an actress who did exist, by way of a stand-in in Seberg talking directly to the audience and film clips of her career. That is a very low budget affair in comparison which still has a noble ambition). The recreations are the only aspect of The Watermelon Woman you can see the limitations on, as the story of Fae Richards is ambitious to tell in fake film clips, fake newsreels and photos, the costumes the aspect in some cases that provide the historical time frame with severe restrictions. The photos are still effective in historical accuracy, and the home movie footage of Richards at the end of her life is completely poignant, using the appropriate film equipment for this for bringing a viewer into the world of this fictitious figure.

That this is a fiction film with a comedic edge is something that can be easily forgotten to. As much as this is a profound film in its themes, this is still a laid back comedy, whether it is commenting on how awkward a blind date with a girlfriend's friend who is "very spiritual" is, or that Tamera, despite being the proudest of gay women, still sneaks in heterosexual porn tapes into customer orders for herself out of curiosity to see what the other gender's genitalia in action looks like. This is also a film, whilst one sequence only, where for a sex scene Cheryl Dunye herself takes a rare step as a filmmaker, with co-star Guinevere Turner, to do nudity herself which is bold and admirable. That this is also a scene meant to be erotic, but directed from a gay woman's gaze, is of note even if it is just one scene for a film about many, many other things.

The Watermelon Woman was a film I had wanted to see for years, as mentioned, but I am glad, rather than exhilaration felt, it was more a quieted reaction that had to be followed by contemplation. It means actually having to consider the pieces that make up the film, with a greater respect then a flash-in-the-pan emotion of jubilation. The time, allowing this to sink in, shows more of the virtue of the film tenfold to applaud.

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1) A really unexpected is the sight of a poster for Urotsukidôji: Legend of the Overfiend (1989) on a back wall in one scene, a really bizarre background detail to consider nowadays for an entirely different review, but worth mentioning of being of the era.