Elizabeth Wood's feature directorial debut "White Girl," starring "Homeland's" Morgan Saylor, exploded at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and for good reason. This arresting film will haunt you, sticking around with all the tenacity of a bad hangover. It's a wild nightmare of girlhood in New York City, a compendium of the miseries and ecstasies of being female. Sex and the city never seemed so horrifying.
Saylor plays Leah, a rising sophomore at a New York-based university, spending the summer sharing an apartment with her friend Katie (India Menuez), gentrifying the border of the farthest reaches of Bushwick, in Ridgewood, Queens. Leah is a bold bottle blonde from Oklahoma City, and as she quickly announces, she really likes drugs.
That proclivity leads her to make the acquaintance of Blue (Brian Marc), a Latino drug dealer, and soon the two are falling into a drug-fueled lust. Lest you think Blue's the bad guy here, think again. This sensitive guy might be seen as a thug and a criminal, but he's the only man who nurtures and protects Leah. In fact, she seems drawn to him as a protector, having been sexually harassed and assaulted by her dirtbag boss (Justin Bartha) at a magazine internship.
"White Girl" is specifically about race, and the way that it affects how these characters experience the world, their mobility on the street and in life. Bodies of color are judged, contained and restrained, while Leah enjoys the affordances granted her simply by the way that she looks, the way that people read her socially, her blonde hair, nubile body and innocent, freckled visage. When the two hook up, she brings him into her world of downtown Manhattan parties, where he makes triple on his deals. The next morning is another matter, and Blue, snagged by an undercover cop, is shipped off to Rikers.
Leah quickly jumps into action to spring her lover from the clink. "I always figure it out," she says, blowing lines of cocaine for inspiration, and leveraging her friends, family, connections, his stash, and her sexuality in any way to raise enough money to hire Blue a real lawyer (Chris Noth) and get him out of jail.
But in the same way that the film announces that it's about race, right there in the title, it's also equally about Leah's gender, and the way that men exploit and prey upon her. The litany of sexual misdeeds Leah endures, from subway leering and catcalling, to molestation, coerced sex and rape, feels like Wood nailing her list of grievances on behalf of women to the wall, an indictment of men, specifically white men, for their crimes against women. It's angry and visceral.
Saylor is the whirling dervish at the film's center, giving a raw, feral, performance as Leah spirals out of control, diving deeper into a world of drugs and sex. She whipsaws between edgy desperation and uncontrolled pleasure-seeking mania. It's the extremely dark version of a girl gone wild, unfettered, vulnerable to the world and its whims, much more powerful than her determination and resourcefulness.
Leah's decisions are hers and hers alone, and what she puts in motion can't be undone. But the consequences are metered by the larger social forces, not individual actions. Despite her rocky journey down the rabbit hole, Leah's still just a white girl.
