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Review of “Watermelon Woman”

While lesbian films have gotten slicker and better funded since the early-90s boom in 16mm, indie, experimental features, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman endures as a smart and sexy self-portrait of a young, black lesbian and her take on her world.

The film’s opening scene sets the stage for portraying two worlds that overlap but remain separate. Two black women are videotaping a wedding reception for a black groom and a white, Jewish bride where guests are cordial to each other but mostly keep to their own kind. They come together when the videographers line them up for a formal portrait, but then a white photographer swoops in to capitalize on the two women’s work – stepping into the frame with neither a qualm nor a clue to take still shots of the scene they arranged.

Even as the groups converge, one is pushed aside, and the pushers lack the awareness of their actions. The ambitious film delves into multiple themes: representations of black women in cinema, youthful struggles to balance pursuing goals and paying the bills, interracial relationships, and everyday racism and homophobia, for starters – with a love story thrown in to boot.

But the love story doesn’t overpower the film; it is passion-filled but ultimately kept in its place, much like the affair at its center.

Dunye plays a young filmmaker named Cheryl who works at a video store in Philadelphia (Dunye’s hometown) and has the aforementioned videography business on the side. But her real passion is researching and documenting the life of a black film actress from the ’30s billed only as “watermelon woman.”

Cheryl discovers that the woman, whose real name was Fae Richards, started out as a lounge singer in the vibrant African American club scene that flourished before the Depression, also starring in black-made films before being relegated to mammy roles once Hollywood took over.

More important, Cheryl discovers that Fae is more of a sister than she initially imagined. Not only was she a young black woman living in Philly and working to make a name for herself in film, but Fae turns out to be a lesbian too. And soon after learning that Fae had an ongoing affair with a white woman (the director of the Hollywood films she appeared in), Cheryl finds herself dating a white woman – a customer who picks her up at the video store.

The woman in question, Diana (Guinevere Turner), is not only white and rich but privileged in ways that surpass her own awareness.

From the start, Tamara (Valarie Walker) – Cheryl’s friend, coworker, business partner and sidekick – is relentless in her disapproval of the relationship. She is always trying to set Cheryl up with black women, none of whom Cheryl is attracted to. Tamara’s knee-jerk disdain for all things white puts Cheryl off.

But eventually Cheryl is equally turned off by the suspiciously high number of black women and men she learns Diana has dated.

And just as Fae’s longtime white lover put her in movies but wasn’t the ultimate love of her life, as Diana sets out to further Cheryl’s project she leads her to encounter the racism that makes a project like hers relevant in the first place, and gets herself kicked out of the picture.

Dunye’s characters are at once humorous parodies and frightfully realistic portraits. She takes shots at black as well as white ethnocentrism, without losing sight of the pernicious institutionalization of the latter.

The black cop is as overenthusiastic about racial profiling as his white partner when they harass Cheryl for looking “suspicious” (standing on the sidewalk) and being in possession of what they say appears to be stolen property (her video equipment). These sequences are a bit over-the-top, but hardly farfetched.

Dunye has referred to The Watermelon Woman as a “Dunyementary.” The film is part narrative, part pseudo-documentary; semi-autobiographical and self-referential. The story-within-a-story with Dunye as the main character might seem self-indulgent or gimmicky except that she’s engaging and has a sense of humor about herself and her serious subject matter. As are the others, her own character is comically flawed.

Much of the film’s footage seems so realistic and unscripted that it makes you wonder whether the subjects are even aware they’re in a mockumentary. Some of the funniest bits involve Dunye approaching people on the street and interviewing them on camera about what they’ve heard about the woman known as the Watermelon Woman. And Dunye casts her own mother to play herself in a performance so convincing that it seems like she isn’t acting at all.

The worlds of fact and fiction intersect further when Cheryl refers to “Guin and Rose,” the women who made Go Fish, shortly before Guin herself is introduced as Diana. Another scene opens with a painfully humorous karaoke performance by V.S. Brodie, who played Eli Go Fish.

Cameos abound in Watermelon Woman, and several queer icons have bit parts in the film. Brian Freeman, member of the Pomo Afro Homos improv troupe, appears as a witty collector of black film memorabilia. Author/activist Sarah Schulman plays a humorless, borderline fascist member of a feminist archive collective, The Center for Lesbian Information and Technology (nice acronym, right?).

Douglas Crimp, Michelle Wallace and Cheryl Clarke also make appearances, and Dunye collaborated with Zoe Leonard and Douglas McKeown, respectively, to make the faux-archival photos and film of Fae and her contemporaries.

But the cameo that steals the show is motor-mouthed Camille Paglia‘s. The controversial cultural critic turns in a hilarious parody of herself that is so characteristically outrageous that Dunye has said festival-goers frequently asked her whether Paglia was aware of her own obnoxiousness.

Paglia goes as far as taking issue with black scholars’ take on the mammy figure and the significance of watermelon, which she appropriates as a symbol of her own heritage – going so far as to point out that it contains the colors of the Italian flag. The portrayal is so realistic that either Paglia has a healthy sense of humor about herself or she’s so brazen that she was truly just speaking her mind. Perhaps it’s a case of both.

The film’s epitaph is “Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction.”

Dunye creates a fiction so captivatingly enigmatic that without that closing statement most viewers would probably run to Google Fae Richards as soon as the credits roll. And it’s worth mentioning that the credits for this film about a woman who was denied due credit, end with an enormously long list of people who took part in the film.

It’s also notable that a film that addresses racism and homophobia was denounced by one Senator Jesse Helms – preoccupied with the film’s single, graphic but tasteful and brief sex scene – as “flotsam floating down a sewer.”

If that isn’t the mark of quality queer cinema, what is?

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