Yvonne Rainer’s amazing
Privilege seems at first like
a relatively conventional documentary on menopause, made up in large part of filmed
testimonies: given society’s (as the film establishes) general unease with the
topic, it would hold interest if it were no more than this. But things rapidly start to morph and pivot: a title card announces a new film within
the film, also called
Privilege, but now driven by a different Yvonne
(played by an actress) interviewing a middle-aged woman called Jenny on the topic, which
in turn opens up a dramatization of an anecdote from Jenny’s earlier days in
New York, extending the canvas from biological determination to include issues
of class and race (and, well, pretty much everything). The challenge of
traversing the change of life becomes just one bridge in a dizzyingly complex
landscape, in which awareness of one’s privilege in one area may only increase one’s
blindness to in others: the film maintains its narrative and formal unpredictability
to the end, shifting its focus and its technique, even to the point of
sometimes hardly bothering to be a film (often we’re just staring at substantial
blocks of text on a computer screen). The film’s challenge extends to the
smallest matters of filmic convention, announcing itself as a film “by Yvonne
Rainer and many others”, and starting to run the closing credits some fifteen
minutes before the end, taking up much of that time observing a gathering of
cast and crew, emphasizing the collective and essentially celebratory nature of
the project. It’s a celebration, that is, insofar as attitudes have traveled
some distance – a woman talks near the end about the relief of being able to
talk openly now about not wanting children – but one carried out in full
acknowledgment of remaining fractures, prejudices, blind spots and injustices.
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