The Girlfriend Experience: Portrait of a transaction-based modern society
Posted: November 8, 2009 Filed under: ARTS, WORKS | Tags: film review, moviefix, ninemsn, sasha grey, the girlfriend experience Leave a comment »ninemsn
Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” is a portrait of an upscale Manhattan call girl called Chelsea, who services her clients with more than just sex; she simulates a romantic relationship, too. The film is less a story, and more an impressionistic sketch of her life, assembled with moments taken from five days in late 2008.
The US economy is on a downward spiral, and Chelsea’s clients, namely high-powered businessmen are in a state of panic. She provides them with a bland but supportive by-the-hour girlfriend, the kind willing to listen demurely and then fulfill all their sexual desires.
Chelsea, too, is concerned about business. When she’s not fending off new stars in the escort business, she is improving her website, being reviewed by nasty Internet critics and, of course, maintaining her tools of the trade: her body and wardrobe.
The message is clear. Everyone in cutthroat New York is selling themselves.
Casting plays a critical role in this film. Soderbergh didn’t just put any old actress in the key part. He invited porn star du jour, the zeitgeisty, Internet and pop culture-savvy 21-year-old Sasha Grey to make her mainstream film debut.
For those not familiar with Grey, she has become one of the world’s most popular stars in the adult film industry, as much famed for her voracious sexuality (which is little seen in this film), as the deliberate intellectualism with which she carries out her “performance art”, as she calls it.
It’s hard to say whether Grey is an unspectacular actor, or very good at playing a character who perpetually presents herself as a hollow shell into which men can project their fantasies. Either way, the end effect is appropriate.
Like her clients, we very rarely get a taste of a real flesh-and-blood Chelsea. Just a beautiful, passive zombie, who is careful never to offer a glimpse of what lies behind her glassy expression. Not even to the journalist fruitlessly probing for more.
It’s a film that’s hardly emotionally satisfying, nor attempting to pass any moral judgment. Instead, it recreates the numbness of a transaction-based modern society: of money passing from one hand to another, of humanity debased by a dollar value.
ninemsn’s MovieFix, November 2009.
