Cheryl Dunye | She Don’t Fade / 1991

the second time around

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cheryl Dunye (director) She Don’t Fade / 1991

 

 

 

      Cheryl Dunye’s 1991 film, She Don’t Fade hints of what the more exciting, complex, and richer life she hints at in her 1990 film, Janine, might entail. 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, allowing, as she will also in other works, 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.” In 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 whose path she has just 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?

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).