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conventional moviemaking. Rainer has become identified with a filmmaking approach that provides narrative development by means of a variety of anti-illusionistic means: most obviously, she develops characters who enact scenes that are inevitably revealed as fabrications as they are presented: usually we see the scene and the filming of it, simultaneously; and she uses a variety of forms of printed or spoken textsome of it written by Rainer, much of it borrowed from other sourcesthat elaborate a weave of narrative actions that are "shot" in the mind of the viewer.
Privilege
uses Rainer's approach in order to explore the issues of menopause and racism.
The very idea of centering a feature film on menopause, which, as Rainer makes clear in
Privilege,
has been culturally defined as
un
pleasurethe tail end of youth and eroticism, the epitome of the uncinematicis an explicit critique of the conventional cinema and its limited view of women. The fact that
Privilege
is an enjoyable film, fascinating even to rather conventional audiences (at least in my experience as an exhibitor), makes it a breakthrough, the ultimate cinematic magic trick, and a potential catalyst for the liberation of women and men from conventional definitions that have tended to constrict our lives in the most obvious ways.
The central narrative thread of
Privilege
is the reminiscences of Jenny, a white woman of middle age, about a particular, troubling moment early in her career as a dancer. In her "hot flashback" Jenny recalls moving into an apartment in a comparatively high-rent building next door to her less affluent Puerto Rican and African-American neighbors, Carlos, Digna, and Stew. Jenny lives directly above Brenda, who is a lesbian. Like other neighborhood residents, Jenny becomes accustomed to the fights between Carlos and Digna. Soon after Digna is arrested and taken to Bellevue after a particularly violent fight, Carlos enters Brenda's apartment late at night, naked, and when Brenda screams, Jenny comes to her rescue. Ultimately, Brenda presses charges and Jenny, annoyed at the defense attorney's attempts to categorize her as a loose woman, perjures herself, saying she actually saw Carlos in Brenda's apartment, and she becomes lovers with the assistant district attorney. This central episode is elaborated by Rainer in characteristically anti-illusionist fashion: throughout her flashback, Jenny remains her current, menopausal age; Digna becomes an invisible (to the other characters) commentator, particularly about Jenny's love affair with the wealthy assistant district attorney; and the narrative is regularly interrupted by other kinds of information, including dramatizations of dreams.
Interwoven with the basic melodramatic situation are numerous interviews about menopause with Jenny and with many women who are clearly not characters in the film's central fiction. The interviews are