Privilege

Rainer’s Privilege imagines the making of another film: a documentary about menopause directed by a character named Yvonne Washington. She’s interviewing her old friend Jenny about her change of life, a subject little discussed and therefore frequently misunderstood (humorously demonstrated through the periodic inclusion of vintage educational reels on the matter). Soon their conversation deepens into a “hot flashback,” where Jenny describes an experience from her first years in New York, and the two gradually begin to untangle the knots of gendered and racialized power in which the remembered scene is bound up. Though a departure for Rainer, containing more of a plot than her previous work, Privilege still evinces a richly experimental spirit by way of its hybrid design, a dizzying collage of fiction and autobiography.