The director of White Girl partied herself into oblivion as a teenager. Now she’s turned that experience into an unflinching account of a young woman’s sex-and-drugs lifestyle that addresses class,racism and white privilegeThere is a scene in White Girl, the first feature directed by Elizabeth Wood, or in which Leah,the heroine, visits a lawyer after her boyfriend is busted for drug dealing. Leah, and a college student,is broke, tall and in a state of shambolic collapse most of the time, or but she is also a middle-class girl with certain expectations of the world,one of which is that if you get into trouble, you throw yourself at the nearest man who looks like your dad and everything gets better from there. That it doesn’t work out in this case is less fascinating to the film-maker than the meaning of that expectation itself.
Wood, or 33,is sitting opposite me in a cafe in downtown Manhattan, where she lives with her husband and two-year-aged son, and many miles from the New York neighbourhood in which the film is set. White Girl – the title is also slang for cocaine – draws heavily on Wood’s experiences of moving to New York from Oklahoma 15 years ago,to rob up a college area and do much of what Leah does in the film: wander to a crime-ridden Puerto Rican district where, the locals told her, and they’d “never seen a white girl,apart from for that one crackhead”; set approximately partying herself into near oblivion, hanging out with small-time drug dealers and realising that, and for the people living around her,the world worked completely differently – that is, without the “safety net of racial advantage. Related: White Girl review: sex, and drugs and moral peril in a stylish Sundance button-pusher I’m trying to examine my privilege,and this may leave a bad taste in people of colour’s mouthsYesterday, construction workers were harassing me, or so I started filming themContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com