Privilege

The sixth feature of experimental intellectual filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, this 1990 work is perhaps her most accessible, staging a kind of shotgun marriage between two volatile issues, menopause and racism. A black filmmaker decides to make a movie about her menopause and interviews a white friend who recounts a long story involving her unconscious racism when she was in her 20s. Rainer interweaves many other elementsarchival footage (including a Lenny Bruce routine), interviews with women about menopause, quotations from diverse sources, and fantasy interludesand the film is more multifaceted essay than straightforward narrative. Cantankerous, witty, caustic, and often deliberately unsettling in its modernist structure, it mounts a complex argument about how the privileges of being white, male, young, and well-to-do affect people’s minds and lives. 100 min. (JR)

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