a welcoming embrace: three movies by cheryl dunye of
the 90s
by
Douglas Messerli
Cheryl
Dunye (director and actor) Janine / 1990
Cheryl
Dunye (director) She Don’t Fade / 1991
Pat
Branch and Cheryl Dunye (writers), Cherly Dunye (director) Potluck and the
Passion / 1993
There
is something terribly comforting about watching black lesbian director Cheryl
Dunye’s films. It is almost as if she greets her viewers at the gate of her own
being, like it were a house into which you are immediately invited.
I am not suggesting that she simplifies or
sanitizes the issues of sexuality which these films discuss; but, particularly
for those who might be a bit frightened about lesbianism, not to say the racial
concerns her work sometimes calls up,
Dunye simply prepares the viewer for what the film is about to show us
and the implications of what her work means ahead of time. A bit like the
playwright María Irene Fornés, particularly in Fefu and Her Friends,
Dunye not only directly introduces many of her films, but invites the audience
into the various rooms of her house, the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and
sometimes even the bathroom, where we get various perspectives of the action
which her actors have already outlined, often sharing with us how they see the
characters they are about to perform. Even my unknowingly racist mother,
fearful of alternative sexualities, might basically have felt comfortable in
watching Dunye’s seemingly amateur videos.
One of the earliest of this period in her
career, the 1990 work Janine is a monologue in which the narrator lights
two candles, filmed in color, before she begins her basically black and white framed
tale (the black narrator Dunye sporting a white T-shirt) that, in fact, is
about a black and white teenage relationship between herself and a fellow
student, Janine with whom she played basketball of Mercy of Mary Academy near
Philadelphia.
Janine
lived across the “main line” in the wealthy neighborhoods Lower Merion and Bala
Cynwyd side with a working mother who drove a BMW, whereas Dunye grew up in far
more rustic circumstances in Philadelphia. Although Dunye has sought out the
relationship with the blue-eyed, blonde Janine, she admits that, even after
they had seeming become friends, there “always was a constant struggle.” “I
felt insignificant,” she suggests, and wanted to be more…well white.”
One incident speaks volumes, as Dunye
describes that after a basketball practice she showered in Janine’s house,
putting shampoo directly onto her hair, when her friend, observing the act,
intervened: “That’s so wrong. We don’t do it that way.” Later, Janine would
offer Dunye her used clothes as if her friend’s mother couldn’t afford to
properly dress her.
As she grows older, Dunye begins to
perceive her sexual difference, visiting lesbian bars and, always off campus,
gradually moving into sexual relationships with other women. Finally, in the 12th
grade, Janine’s friend reveals to her that she is lesbian. At first, Janine
seems quite at ease with the fact, but later calls to tell her that she cried
for a long while after. Finally, Janine’s mother calls, suggesting that she
will pay for Dunye to visit a doctor to help her with her problem.
That ended the relationship between the
girls. Yet Dunye felt, justifiably, that Janine and her mother had had the last
the word, and sometime later, on a Thanksgiving, called her up, only to be
reminded by Janine’s constant mention of the great times they had shared in
school—few of which Dunye recalled since her mind had far more centered about
her own sexual issues—her “dear” friend from the past announcing that she was
now living in Washington, D.C. where she had a $30,000 job and, like her
mother, drove a BMW. Several times, apparently, she mentioned to Dunye that she
is soon to be married. But the final straw was when Janine brought up the fact
that several of their fellow female students had had babies out of wedlock,
which Janine felt was a sin.
Slowly we observe, the two candles lit
in the first moments, have now gone out. The narrator has finally realized,
with a new self-confidence, that her life and Janine’s have gone in quite
opposite directions.
It is the simple frankness of this
confessional narrative that puts all the weight in Dunye’s court, leaving the
seemingly perfect Janine looking like a somewhat mindless bigot. The happily
ever-after life that Janine is looking forward to will never be as honest,
robust, and exciting as Dunye’s life, of which the short film itself is
testament.
The director’s 1991 film, She Don’t
Fade hints of what that more exciting, complex, and richer life might
entail. This time Dunye plays a character named Shae Clarke, a 29-year-old who explains
her role in the plot, such as it is, of this brief presentation of the vagaries
of love, and, as she will also in other works, allows the other actors to also
explain their characters to the audience. The self-declared “dyke yenta” friend
of Shae’s, Zoie Strauss, however, gives the first abbreviated lowdown of the
story “about the wild world of lesbianism” where Shae first meets one woman
with whom she develops a nice relationship. The video camera, very much
presenting this as a cinematic event, even shows the two having a kind of
lifeless sex in bed—which Zoie has described as “getting down and dirty. If
fact there is absolutely nothing “dirty” about the artful presentation of two
woman having sex as the cinematographer maneuvers them into position.
Everything in Shae’s life, including her new job as a street vendor and the
woman whom she has just met seems to be going extremely well.
That is, until taking a stairs to a
pedestrian bridge to her own apartment she meets another woman going down and
falls desperately in love. Without even knowing who the stranger is, Shae
breaks up with the first woman, desperately seeking out the other woman who
path she has accidentally crossed.
At a party attended by both her lesbian
and gay male friends, Zoie suddenly points out a woman across the room and both
Shae and the woman she has seen on the stairs are quickly swept up into a relationship
which looks to be more long-lasting than the previous one, particularly since
their unbridled sex scene is far steamier than the earlier “staged” coupling.
It is, as Zoie has told us from start, familiar
territory even in Hollywood films: someone falling in love only to quickly find
someone else who she loves far more intensely; isn’t that, after all, the story
of the Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr film, An Affair to Remember? So Dunye
seems to ask, what’s the big deal if its two women instead of a gay man and a
woman who played basically prim and proper women (twice as a nun)? Haven’t we
now just entered through a back door into a far tamer version of Jack Smith’s Flaming
Creatures?
Dunye’s even more complex The Potluck
and the Passion, which is truly closer to Fornes’ work. To celebrate their
1st yet together, Dunye and her friend decide to invite a select
group of each of their best friends, most unknown to one another.
The funniest pair of these luncheon guests
are a lesbian couple living in New York who travel down to the couple’s home
without having the proper directions and losing their way several times while
attempting to buy their contributions to the potluck in convenience stores
along the way, only eventually to eat most of it when they again become lost.
They arrive after nearly everyone has dined and made friends with one another—a
white Janine-like woman who has brought along a black lesbian woman she has
just met responding to her friend’s interest in another invitee by storming out
of the event at the very moment the stragglers finally enter.
Perhaps, however, we should describe her
departure as the beginning rather than an ending, since the girl she has dragged
along finds not only that she has a great deal in common with another
interloper, who has brought a long a delicious spicy chicken dish, but so
enjoys the entree that she insists she must watch the other prepare a new batch.
In fact, we might argue, the potluck is only the beginning as it leads into a
night of new passions, of relationships and deep friendships these women have
quickly developed by simply being brought into the hot-house atmosphere of
Dunye’s and her lover’s welcoming embrace.
Los
Angeles, July 26, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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