Watch The Trailer For ‘White Girls’, This Year’s Film About Privileged White Kids Doing Drugs
Because kids doing cocaine in New York is still edgy subject matter, apparently.
If you watch the trailer for White Girls and have the nagging feeling that you’ve seen it all before, that’s because you probably have. The directorial debut by Elizabeth Wood, tells the story of a New York college girl named Leah (Morgan Saylor a.k.a Dana from Homeland) who hooks up with a Puerto Rican drug dealer called Blue (Brian Marc). What follows is a neon-lit montage of dancing and making “Oh no, I regret everything” faces and being controversial.
They do a lot of cocaine. Leah has anonymous sex in a club (I imagine that Skrillex is playing, but TBC). In the first 45 seconds of the trailer, the word ‘cocaine’ is sung seven times. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because ‘white kids do drugs and get in trouble in New York’ is a dusty (cocaine dust?) old plot that is no longer shocking enough for people to confuse an edgy film with a good one.
One of the reviews in the trailer compares it to Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids, which is still confronting in its frank portrayal of sexually active teens and substance abuse. Back then it reflected a reality that many people didn’t want to confront. In the last twenty years, there have been many films touted to be the next Kids (many of them just blatant rip-offs) but stories that are primarily about glamorous, young white women dealing drugs and not much else, have the faintest whiff of faux-controversy.
But hey, maybe it’s just a crummy, derivative trailer! What did reviewers think? Well, it seems like The Hollywood Reporter writer Leslie Felperin thought it was, ah, worthy of a lot of evocative adjectives: “First-feature-maker Elizabeth Wood’s cocaine-dusted, semen-soaked provocation takes an unapologetically pitiless look at one privileged young woman’s walk through the hot coals of crime, class and desperation,” he writes.
“Seductive and repellent by turns, it’s a title that will provoke fierce love-or-hate reactions, but there’s no question it augurs the arrival of a powerful, audacious new directorial talent.”
If “semen-soaked provocation” is what you’re after, White Girls is out in the U.S in August.