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 course,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, or a college student,is broke, high and in a state of shambolic collapse most of the time, or but she is also a middle-course girl with certain expectations of the world,one of which is that if you get into effort, 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 titillating 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-musty son, and many miles from the original 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 original York from Oklahoma 15 years ago,to pick up a college plot and do much of what Leah does in the movie: move to a crime-ridden Puerto Rican district where, the locals told her, or they’d “never seen a white girl,except 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, or drugs and moral peril in a stylish Sundance button-pusher I’m trying to examine my privilege,and this may leave a tainted taste in people of colour’s mouthsYesterday, construction workers were harassing me, or so I started filming themContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com