Review: The Girlfriend Experience (2009) **** 1/2

“If they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn’t be paying you.”
- Sasha Grey in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience

Steven Soderbergh’s latest film opens with a standard-issue, upwardly mobile couple on a date. There is a cab-ride discussion of the movie they’ve just seen and this carries over to an expensive dinner at an upscale restaurant. After dinner, there is wine and small talk on the couch of his well-appointed Manhattan apartment. The small talk leads to kissing and the kissing leads to love making. The next morning there is some chitchat about the faltering economy over breakfast on the rooftop patio – it’s one of many such conversations in a film that takes place in the days leading up to the 2008 presidential election.

Eventually the young woman dresses to leave for the day and on her way out, she pulls an envelope from her expensive handbag and thumbs through the cash inside. This is Christine, a professional escort going by the name of Chelsea. In a modern world where everything is a commodity, she’s selling the ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ and it is a lonely, limitless market.

Abstractly sketching a week in the life of this pretty, seemingly confident and independent young woman as she juggles clients, a boyfriend and her own desire to get ahead amid a fear of obsolescence, the plot is relatively simple. Christine/Chelsea’s drive leaves her at the mercy of the sleazier elements of society – in this case an unscrupulous website owner (creepily played by uncredited film critic Glenn Kenny) who promises her a good review in exchange for sex. This experience in turn leaves her vulnerable and she opens up to one of her clients; a professional no-no that exposes a chink in her emotional armor and threatens to destroy the relationship she’s built up over a year and a half with her understanding boyfriend.

Though the narrative is straightforward, it is arranged in fragments that have been jumbled chronologically. It’s not just a gimmick to disguise a worn out story idea because Soderbergh is less interested in his plot than he is in conveying a mood. The prismatic slivers of narrative galvanize your attention by forcing you to focus on how each one fits together. The result is that you’re left with an overriding sense of tone and feeling rather than an A to B to C understanding of the story. Rational analysis is defeated in favor of emotional engagement. At the same time, there is a cold detachment to the proceedings that is typical of Soderbergh and is uniquely suited to the emotional distance between the characters in his story.

With its tale of an independent woman supporting herself by selling sex, its theme of the commodification of the modern world and its core of melancholy, the most obvious point of reference for The Girlfriend Experience is probably Godard’s My Life to Live, though Soderbergh is largely apolitical and his prostitution metaphor is less explicit. A more interesting echo comes from Hal Ashby’s Shampoo, another film set at a time of great change on the cusp of an important political election with a main character who clings to the illusion of independence by selling sex. Picking up long after the sad ending of Ashby’s film, this is the dark, post-sexual revolution reflection of an earlier, sunnier time. The main character is a woman instead of a man, it’s the cold East Coast instead of the sunny West, and there’s a decided lack of passion to the lovemaking. Here sex is no longer an expression of freedom but has instead been reduced to something that is bought and sold.

Indeed, though this is a film about sex, it is largely unerotic. There is a wisp of nudity (rare for a Soderbergh film), but most of the time Chelsea spends with her clients is in conversation. One of her potential clients even refers to it as a substitute for therapy. Not coincidentally, the men all seem to be in either the financial or entertainment industries – one group knowing all about commodities and the other knowing all about being commodified. It fits because in the end, Chelsea is just pushing another product: a temporary ray of light in the abyss and a cure for loneliness in a world increasingly denuded of meaning.

The Girlfriend Experience received an undo amount of attention for the lead casting of porn star Sasha Grey, a woman whose entrée into show business was predicated on a willingness to perform anal sex on demand and on camera. While it’s tempting to think of it in marketing terms as a bit of stunt casting – she did net a movie with an estimated $1.7M budget more press and prurient interest than it ordinarily would have earned – her turn as Christine turns out to be one of the elements that make the movie as good as it is. Soderbergh has a knack for inspiring career-best performances in his actresses and here it is Grey who brings an extra dimension to her role. As Chelsea, Christine traffics among the upper classes of society – people who can afford to pay her $2000 an hour. There’s a veneer of sophistication to her with her designer clothing and long, expensively tended, silky brown hair, but underneath there’s a bluntness and a coldness befitting a young woman who has seen too much of the darker side of humanity too soon. This is not Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and Grey lends Christine a genuine edge.

Also, though she can drop the names of important designers and artists, Christine doesn’t pull it off in the way of someone who grew up with these things. She’s an outsider with just enough culture to pass as refined, but never enough to ever be in danger of being mistaken for upper class. She’s a twenty-first century Holly Golightly, driven to rise above her birth, but swimming in waters where she is nothing more than the perfect disposable companion. As such, a young porn star with the self-awareness possessed by Ms. Grey is probably just the right person to play her. It’s a brilliant bit of casting.

Though his lead is the standout, Soderbergh’s style of filming quickly and improvisationally (as he did with Bubble) created the perfect environment for his entire cast of largely non-actors. Everyone delivers natural, unstaged and unstilted performances. They’re never required to display a great deal of range, but they appear to be genuine people and the film takes on an almost documentary like reality.

Surprisingly for such a micro-budgeted project, the cinematography by Soderbergh himself (credited once again as Peter Andrews) is among the more beautiful of any film this year. Though at times almost distractingly exquisite, the visuals aren’t just for show. They enhance the mood and also help organize the fragments of the story. Recorded digitally, scenes are shot in distinct color palettes shifting from warm yellows to cold blues with more balanced natural lighting in between. Soderbergh also uses his wide screen as a canvas to either isolate his characters so that they almost disappear into the corner of his expansive frame or he uses it to separate them visually as they fail to connect with one another. Enhancing this sense of disconnectedness, subjects are sometimes shot out of focus, obscured by objects or seen in or through reflections.

Though it is at times an intellectually distant film, The Girlfriend Experience delivers a surprising emotional punch with a poignant final scene where Chelsea visits one more client with an unusual need. It’s a moment of impossible loneliness, heart wrenching intimacy and almost disturbing tenderness. In a story of cool calculation that only reveals fleeting glimpses of emotion, the scene comes suddenly and surprisingly and it instantly transforms a good film into a great one.

Constantly shifting from high-budget mainstream crowd pleasers like Ocean’s Eleven, to more ambitious, challenging fare like Traffic, and to personal, borderline experimental films like Full Frontal, Steven Soderbergh continues to push the boundaries with his latest - a more satisfying extension of the low-budget, on-the-fly approach he brought to Bubble. Less a film about the rise and fall of one woman in the big city than a look at our society and the world we live in as a whole, The Girlfriend Experience is one of the best films in a career already full of highlights.

The Girlfriend Experience. USA 2009. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Screenplay by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Cinematography by Steven Soderbergh (as Peter Andrews). Music score composed by Ross Godfrey. Edited by Mary Ann Bernard. Starring Sasha Grey, Chris Santos, Philip Eytan, Timothy Davis and David Levien. 1 hour 17 minutes. MPAA rated R for sexual content, nudity and language. 4.5 stars (out of 5)

Filed under: Reviews
Tags: Brian Koppelman, Chris Santos, David Levien, Mary Ann Bernard, Philip Eytan, Ross Godfrey, Sasha Grey, Steven Soderbergh, The Girlfriend Experience, Timothy Davis