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| Cheryl Dunye and Valarie Walker in The Watermelon Woman |
Fiction is often a surer way of getting to the truth than fact. Or as Cheryl Dunye puts it in a title card at the end: "Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction." So by inventing a Black lesbian film actress of the 1930s, Fae Richards, known as "The Watermelon Woman," Dunye is able to capture some of the unwritten history of Black women who also happened to be lesbians in the era when to be Black, female, and lesbian was a kind of triple whammy. What sustains the film is the skill with which Dunye crafts her Watermelon Woman, an analog to the actresses like Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, and Butterfly McQueen who found themselves stuck playing maids and mammies, upholders of the straight white norm, in motion pictures. Dunye manages to almost make us believe in the existence of Fae Richards, helped by photographer Zoe Leonard, who shot the stills and archival photographs that give the actress a reality she never really had. The Watermelon Woman could be too easily pigeonholed as a "niche film," one aimed at a Black audience or a lesbian audience or even an audience of film scholars who get the allusions to real actors (and directors such as Dorothy Arzner) in the movie. But it manages to transcend such reductive labeling. It's a film about marginalizing, misrepresentation, stereotyping, and all the common forms of willful ignorance of lives other than the ones we consider normative. That it's also often a very funny film doesn't hurt. I happen to think Dunye's movie falls apart toward the end, when it doesn't reach a logical or emotional climax, but that's not a fatal flaw for a movie of such penetrating intelligence.
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