Is there a film that I’m less qualified to talk about than The Watermelon Woman? Probably, but certainly I couldn’t possibly fully comprehend quite everything the film is about. That is to say, ‘beyond the obvious’. It’s not as if the film is some unfathomable and impenetrable thing. Quite the opposite, really. Oh, well, here we are and I’m going to talk about a film by and about a black lesbian looking at the role of black people, women in particular, in the cinema.

So, yes, a combination of romantic comedy-drama and fictionalised documentary, The Watermelon Woman is typically deemed a classic of lesbian cinema. It follows Cheryl Dunye, playing a fictionalised version of herself, an aspiring filmmaker in Philadelphia who makes ends meet by working in a video shop (because it is the ‘90s and there is time for Klax) and shooting wedding videos on the side. While researching a personal project about black actresses in ‘golden age’ films; often uncredited, usually in some sort of ‘mammy’ role; she finds herself particularly fascinated by one such actress (Lisa Marie Bronson), known only as ‘the Watermelon Woman’. Trying to follow what few crumbs of information she can, she finds herself deep in the hidden side of film history, a side that at best people couldn’t seem to care less about and at worst want to remain hidden. During all this, Cheryl’s personal and romantic life are getting more and more complicated as well, as her own situation starts to mirror that of her subject.

So, then… as a film by a black lesbian about blackness and lesbianism, suffice to say, this is pretty low rent. It was the ‘90s (and there was time for Klax). While films that dealt with one or the other were becoming more common, studios weren’t exactly throwing money at them. And so long we’re being cynical about it, we’ll note that few of those were by black people or lesbians (or women generally, really). This thing’s budget was about US$300k, a fairly paltry sum, about a tenth of which coming from the US government’s National Endowment for the Arts. This proved controversial when pearl clutching types got wind of it, because the film has a sex scene! With two women! Obviously! Ergo, the agency is using taxpayer money to make pornography! Yeah, so this film was at the centre of that particular right-wing brouhaha, along with some other gay and lesbian themed films that had indirectly received NEA funding (the funding in fact came from another arts group that received funding from the agency), which was in no way a bid by the Republican party to try and cut funding to the arts, or indeed to try and hide away minorities in a manner like the film talks about. Suffice to say, the lone sex scene isn’t especially explicit and is generally quite tame by modern standards. Hell, it’s probably quite tame compared to contemporary hetero sex scenes. Perhaps a bit longer than need be, but nevertheless it’s fairly tastefully done and nowhere near as laughable as some other lesbian sex scenes in films… or long for that matter, naming no Blue is the Warmest Colours (2013) and its sex scene that feels like the fight scene from They Live (1988), you know the one. Perhaps because there are actual lesbians involved in both the scene and the actual direction as a whole.

That idiocy aside, what can I say?

The film is, for the most part, a comedy, but as it digs further into the subject matter, that is to say the life of this lost black actress and chanteuse, the comedic element gradually fades into the background as the film opens up into a fairly interesting consideration of race and sexuality (and the intersection thereof) in cinema. ‘Gradually’ is the operative word here; it segues into it in a fairly natural feeling was as the protagonist goes further down the rabbit hole in her research, as well as the changing circumstances in her own situation. A shift tone of this sort isn’t exactly uncommon in queer cinema, but it seems rarer to see one that does so in such a steady manner rather than just throwing it at you abruptly.

As you might assume, the ideas of race and homosexuality intersect with the reveal that the mysterious woman was herself a lesbian with her break, such as it was, coming from her connection with a white lesbian filmmaker. This being an allusion, one assumes, to Dorothy Arzner, one of the only female directors to keep at it in Hollywood following increasing homogenisation of content as sound film became standard, with studios wanting safer investments considering increased costs, as well as the introduction of the production code. Indeed, the actor representing the director in the ‘archive’ material within the film (in fact, producer Alexandra Juhasz) does appear to be done up to resemble Arzner, and she is known for her role in launching the careers of some of the prominent actresses of the studio era.

The actual story that the film presents is fictional; there was no real Fae ‘The Watermelon Woman’ Richards. The film extracts and stills we see are themselves fabrications, recreations of things that do not exist. In a broader sense, the story that the film presents is quite true however. There were many Fae Richards, and the extracts and stills are indicative of the sort of things that really did and do exist. The film clips are referred to as “recreations” in the credits, though they do not seem to be derived from specific lost media à la The Forbidden Room (2016) so much as a general recreation of certain types of 1930s/’40s films, with them being pitched accurately enough that they feel like they could be real.

Ultimately, The Watermelon Woman is odd, charming, and perhaps of particular import. It doesn’t all quite hang together; that the eponymous character just happens to be from the same area as the protagonist feels rather dramatically convenient, and it struggles, like so many films, with the sense of the progression of time; it ostensibly takes place over several months though it never really feels like that much time is meant to have passed, which has a knock-on effect, as the relationships portrayed feel reasonably natural in how they progress, but end up feeling at once too fast and not fast enough in how they get there. Still, the film remains one of the enduring classics of queer cinema for a reason; there aren’t many films of this type that see major restorations and re-releases after the fact… at least without someone dying.