I hadn't posted in over a year. I still post my reviews to my Facebook page, but hadn't thought of my film blog in a long time, and figured I'd try to get back into the habit of posting my film reviews so my site doesn't feel dead.
On Criterion, I watched Cheryl Dunye's 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, a movie I hadn't seen since I was a teenager in the 90s. When I was a teenager, I worked as a volunteer at the Cinema Arts Centre, an arthouse movie theater in Huntington, NY, and they had a VHS library of a lot of hard to find movies, and I was allowed to borrow them and sign it out. So I had heard of The Watermelon Woman through a review blurb in Bust Magazine, and watched it, and liked it a lot. I was a little naïve and young to understand all the parts about Black queer culture, but I got into the movie mixing a fake documentary with narrative scenes, where director Cheryl Dunye played a version of herself, working on a film project about an obscure Black actress of the 1930s, relegated to playing "mammy" roles onscreen but having a thrilling off-screen life as a queer Sapphic nightclub performer. The actress is fictional, but is a stand-in for many Black actresses of the time who weren't allowed to play more multidimensional characters in Hollywood films, or had limited exposure in Black cast films (called race films back then) that didn't get as much distribution as Hollywood films did. Dunye shows pictures of actual Black actresses of the time to pay tribute, like Hattie McDaniel, Butterfly McQueen, and Dorothy Dandridge.
So Cheryl works on researching for her film by going to the library, contacting film archives that have Black and/or queer film archives, interviewing people tangentially connected with the actress, and as an archivist, it did make me appreciate all the hard work that went into doing research for a project prior to having more expansive Internet searches, as the Internet back then was still in fan-run Geocities and Angelfire pages back then. Sites like the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive are valuable for finding lots of obscure knowledge on harder subjects, as well as watching Youtube uploads of films that can be hard to find through streaming or physical media.
Cheryl works in a video store with her friend Tamara (Valarie Walker), and Tamara is more the outspoken, blunt friend, while Cheryl is more the shy nerd. Cheryl is courted by a flirty customer named Diana (Guinevere Turner, best-known for directing and starring in Go Fish and appearing in Kevin Smith films in cameos), and it's cool to see a snapshot of life in Philadelphia from a Black lesbian perspective, and seeing the parts of Philly pre-gentrification, like seeing Center City not looking as fancy and upscale as it does now, and the queer history of Philadelphia through the story of the fictional actress from the "interviewees."
It was a nice surprise to see the late writer and NPR contributor David Rakoff in a bit part as a nerdy librarian who Cheryl and Tamara are trying to ask about reference materials for Black film actresses, and he's just giving them the runaround. I have a book of his collected writings, and he did write about how he acted from time to time, switching between a couple of gay stereotypes onscreen, and briefly appeared on a soap opera for fun. He passed away in 2012 from Hodgkin's lymphoma in his late forties.
I like how this film isn't so polished, with some stilted acting and dialogue, switching between video for the documentary parts and film for the narrative parts, the seemingly handwritten title cards, and just the whole creative DIY feel of the film. I'm happy it wasn't lost to time, and has become this queer classic in Black film, queer film, academic studies, and became a part of the Library of Congress' film registry in 2021.
Back then, I had followed Cheryl Dunye's career for awhile, hoping she'd become a big name director. I had watched Stranger Inside, a 2001 HBO TV movie about a young woman who, estranged from her mother, ends up in the same correctional facility that she is in, and is trying to connect with her, but her mother has chosen other female inmates as her surrogate daughters. It follows in the themes of Black queer women, and was an interesting movie to watch as a complicated relationship of a mother and daughter set in a prison. I also watched My Baby's Daddy, a 2004 comedy Dunye directed starring Eddie Griffin, Michael Imperioli, and Anthony Anderson as first-time fathers trying to juggle fatherhood and relationships with their girlfriends and figuring things out. It was decent, though I feel like the title and marketing made it seem sillier than it was, it was more of a relaxed comedy that didn't have goofy slapstick, it felt more realistic. Since then, she's been a college professor and has directed tons of TV episodes, including Lovecraft Country, The Umbrella Academy, Bridgerton, The 4400, and others. I'm happy she's been recognized in more recent years, and that her film is a classic that has been archived and digitized and has stood the test of time since its debut nearly 30 years ago.
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