D+ | An aspiring filmmaker makes her first film about the career of an unnamed mid-century actress. Directed by Cheryl Dunye Starring Cheryl Dunye, Guinevere Turner, and Valarie Walker Review by Jon Kissel |
I volunteer as a screener for the Atlanta Film Festival, and while I’m happy to do it, it does mean watching a lot of bad movies. Bad has a wide spectrum, ranging from incompetently made to unoriginal or indulgent. That last one is the most irritating, as it speaks to a fundamental mismatch between the filmmaker’s perception of themselves and the fact that they’re paying an organization to let them show their movie to other people. Some part of me admires the chutzpah on an indulgent festival applicant, even if their film is not up to snuff. This leads us to The Watermelon Woman, a film that instantly evoked the mental effort required to watch a bad screener and try to come up with something positive to say about it. Cheryl Dunye’s debut indie is politically ahead of its time, as representation has been all the rage in film circles for at least the last decade, but that’s not worth much when it’s simultaneously struggling to piece a coherent scene together.
Dunye’s the auteur behind The Watermelon Woman and she also portrays the lead role of Cheryl, an aspiring director working on her first film. In the meantime, she pays the bills by working as a wedding videographer and a video store clerk, both alongside her best friend Tamara (Valarie Walker). A lover of mid-century Black cinema, such as it was, Cheryl is drawn to a bit role from a film called Plantation Memories. The actress is only credited as Watermelon Woman, and Cheryl decides that her film should be a documentary about uncovering who this mystery woman was.
The Watermelon Woman’s explicit desire to make a film reflecting an underserved demographic isn’t its only way into modern film culture. It’s also circuitously meta, commenting on its own existence and blurring the lines between what’s real and what isn’t. The film’s greatest strength is the incorporation of staged photos and film footage made to look like they’re decades old. This was apparently a budgeting choice, as Dunye decided it was cheaper to stage shots than go to the trouble of unearthing real ones from dense libraries, but it pays off. I ended the film thinking that Plantation Memories was a real movie, and that the Watermelon Woman was a real actress, when both are Dunye’s creations.
If Dunye has a talent for forgery and mimicry, her filmmaking skills are not up to the same level, at least at this stage in her career. Where the staged pictures are convincing in their detail, the rest of The Watermelon Woman is sloppy. Of the spheres within the film, there’s the archival footage, which is strong, the real world of the film, which is leaden, and Cheryl’s film-within-a-film, which is unwatchable. In the real world, drama is falsely mined from love triangles and run-ins with the cops, though these scenes happen and their ramifications are never revisited. Between scenes of Cheryl at her job or with a new girlfriend (Guinevere Turner), the visual style changes to portray a scene from her film, which is uncanny in how much it’s exactly the kind of documentary that I can’t stand. No documentarian, ever, is more interesting than the subject they choose to make a film about. No one watching a documentary, ever, wants to know about why the director choose their subject. When they step in front of the camera or talk about their journey, it’s poison. Cheryl’s film is as much about her as it is about the Watermelon Woman, and her character is not compelling when compared to the life of a Black lesbian actress in the pre-Civil Rights era.
I’ve read about The Watermelon Woman’s status and generally high regard, but I struggle to mine for whatever diamonds might be there. Dunye’s status as a Black lesbian filmmaker making a film about Black lesbians isn’t nothing, but what about her intersectionality makes her leave flubbed lines onscreen, or fade out of a scene mid-conversation? Cheryl’s film includes man-on-the-street interviews where she asks random people if they know who the Watermelon Woman is. Why would anyone? Is she judging people for not knowing about this bit part from an old movie? Is the implication that the Watermelon Woman was credited as that in other movies? This scene drives me insane, because there’s no way into it. It exists as a good idea only in Dunye’s mind. The Watermelon Woman was able to fool me with the archival material, so maybe the crafty Dunye is doing another thing I hate i.e. purposefully making a bad film as a way to comment on something. Alternatively, this is a debut effort that needed a lot more work. With some kinds of leftist filmmaking, not unlike PureFlix-type religious filmmaking, the message is treated as enough, and storytelling and technique are subordinate. For Dunye, the takeaway is that she was most concerned with onscreen representation, and coherent plot or knowable characters is further down the priority list. In the 25 years since this film’s release, plenty of minority filmmakers have been able to do it all. Whatever they owe to Dunye, it’s not knowledge of how to block a scene. D+
The Watermelon Woman’s explicit desire to make a film reflecting an underserved demographic isn’t its only way into modern film culture. It’s also circuitously meta, commenting on its own existence and blurring the lines between what’s real and what isn’t. The film’s greatest strength is the incorporation of staged photos and film footage made to look like they’re decades old. This was apparently a budgeting choice, as Dunye decided it was cheaper to stage shots than go to the trouble of unearthing real ones from dense libraries, but it pays off. I ended the film thinking that Plantation Memories was a real movie, and that the Watermelon Woman was a real actress, when both are Dunye’s creations.
If Dunye has a talent for forgery and mimicry, her filmmaking skills are not up to the same level, at least at this stage in her career. Where the staged pictures are convincing in their detail, the rest of The Watermelon Woman is sloppy. Of the spheres within the film, there’s the archival footage, which is strong, the real world of the film, which is leaden, and Cheryl’s film-within-a-film, which is unwatchable. In the real world, drama is falsely mined from love triangles and run-ins with the cops, though these scenes happen and their ramifications are never revisited. Between scenes of Cheryl at her job or with a new girlfriend (Guinevere Turner), the visual style changes to portray a scene from her film, which is uncanny in how much it’s exactly the kind of documentary that I can’t stand. No documentarian, ever, is more interesting than the subject they choose to make a film about. No one watching a documentary, ever, wants to know about why the director choose their subject. When they step in front of the camera or talk about their journey, it’s poison. Cheryl’s film is as much about her as it is about the Watermelon Woman, and her character is not compelling when compared to the life of a Black lesbian actress in the pre-Civil Rights era.
I’ve read about The Watermelon Woman’s status and generally high regard, but I struggle to mine for whatever diamonds might be there. Dunye’s status as a Black lesbian filmmaker making a film about Black lesbians isn’t nothing, but what about her intersectionality makes her leave flubbed lines onscreen, or fade out of a scene mid-conversation? Cheryl’s film includes man-on-the-street interviews where she asks random people if they know who the Watermelon Woman is. Why would anyone? Is she judging people for not knowing about this bit part from an old movie? Is the implication that the Watermelon Woman was credited as that in other movies? This scene drives me insane, because there’s no way into it. It exists as a good idea only in Dunye’s mind. The Watermelon Woman was able to fool me with the archival material, so maybe the crafty Dunye is doing another thing I hate i.e. purposefully making a bad film as a way to comment on something. Alternatively, this is a debut effort that needed a lot more work. With some kinds of leftist filmmaking, not unlike PureFlix-type religious filmmaking, the message is treated as enough, and storytelling and technique are subordinate. For Dunye, the takeaway is that she was most concerned with onscreen representation, and coherent plot or knowable characters is further down the priority list. In the 25 years since this film’s release, plenty of minority filmmakers have been able to do it all. Whatever they owe to Dunye, it’s not knowledge of how to block a scene. D+
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