Comment: 7

I can see why The Girlfriend Experience has a certain appeal to some major league critics like Roger Ebert and Mike LaSalle (10/10), but that Amazon users are less enthusiastic (6/10).

It was twenty years ago that writer/director Steven Soderbergh stepped onto the stage with his documentaryish Sex, Lies and Videotape which featured Andie MacDowell and a young and pretty James Spader. Since then Soderbergh has ventured from the meandering Kafka (1990) through the noirish Out of Sight and The Limey (1998 & 99), the ever popular Erin Brockovich which upped the acting credentials of the ever popular Julia Roberts, and the artfully constructed Traffic (both in 2000), through the excessively mainstreamed Oceans movies, and now more or less back to the feel of SL&V with The Girlfriend Experience.

While both the early and latter films have a direct, voyeuristic look to them, there is also a deliberate self-conscious attempt to have it both ways: artful and artless, where even the apparent carelessness of the photography (to wit, the vivid exposure of the video in the private jet or the dramatic underexposure and curious focus work in various restaurants in the new movie) are actually carefully worked out to appear vividly overexposed and carelessly underexposed. Of course, it does invite us to sort out why he goes to all the trouble, and each viewer will come to his or her conclusion about whether or not the insight is worth the effort. On the other hand, perhaps you might respond only on an emotional level. I am generally put off when artifice overpowers the emotional experience or gets in the way of a connection to it. It’s what many critics said of Francis Coppola’s One from the Heart, but funnily enough, my reaction was quite different in that case.

Besides Soderbergh’s overt manipulation of image, there is his frequent and clever manipulation of the time line. By now, audiences should be quite used to the device, no longer requiring so much as a “3 days earlier” to help them out. Such road signs might even work against Soderbergh’s plan.

As I see it, the challenge for the filmmaker here is to make interesting a story about someone with almost no affect. It’s not that the actress (porn star Sasha Grey) who appears in almost every scene, is incompetent or unavailable. Quite the contrary. She’s probably exactly the right person for the part, since her character requires a certain vagueness of expression, of circumscribed interaction with others such that her clients are able to project whatever they need onto her in order to feel they got their money’s worth. And she doesn’t come cheap.

Chelsea is a very well paid “escort” who has been in business for a couple of years now and is always looking for ways to improve her product – or at least, the manifestation and promise of same on her website. To this end, she pays consultants and on occasion offers her service to obtain endorsements. Her clients are, for the most part, successful highly paid businessmen. Chelsea dresses fashionably and is often picked up in a limo. The pair might go to a nice restaurant or a movie or both, very likely followed by sex, which, unlike hooker sex, more resembles a night with a girlfriend. They talk business, perhaps as it relates to the final weeks of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and she offers benign, uncommitted comment. Do these men not have such “real” girlfriends” or wives in their lives, we ask ourselves? Do we identify with or wish to be in the shoes (or out of them) of either?

One thing, though, Chelsea has a boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), for some while now. Over a year. Should we see their relationship as “open” or “permissive”? She describes what they have as a “committed relationship.” In any case, how do they really feel about each other, and how do they manage the feelings and the various rationalizations that go with such an arrangement? They have certain rules about what is or is not OK, especially as it pertains to Chelsea’s behavior with her clients. Talk about trust issues!.