I wasn't really sure what to expect from Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience. When the film was inching towards release, the magazines were agog about porn star Sasha Grey's "mainstream" debut, and I remember reading an article in Rolling Stone that didn't make much of an impression. Honestly, if I was going to watch The Girlfriend Experience, it was because of the director, and not the star. And I wasn't really sure I was that interested at the time. Looking back now, I'm glad I gave it a chance.
Steven Soderbergh, like Richard Linklater, are often my typical examples of "50/50" movies. In their respective bodies of work, I like about half of their films, and even though they tend to alternate between commercial fare and strictly low budget, esoteric work, the half and half don't tend to split that way.
For example, I really enjoy the Ocean's films. If you move past the star power and the glitz, Soderbergh is still working within his "reluctant auteur*" M.O., and particularly in the much derided Ocean's Twelve, appears to be playing with the French New Wave playbook in his editing choices and camera angles. On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of The Good German, a purely stylistic exercise in recreating a Hayes Code Era war film with the sensibilities of the American New Wave 70s by way of late-noir "idiot detective" outlook on life. In a sense, the film builds to a Casablanca-derived ending for the express purposes of subverting Casablanca. Interesting, but not very good.
I'm a bit on the fence about Bubble, the film that The Girlfriend Experience reminded me the most of in presentation. Grey aside, The Girlfriend Experience is populated with a cast of lesser or unknown faces, shot handheld on digital cameras (or, in one instance, by a character in the film) in obstructed or distant framing, and with dialogue that sounds at least partially improvised. In this respect, it's also a bit like Full Frontal, a movie of Soderbergh's I wasn't terribly fond of, but The Girlfriend Experience works in ways I wasn't expecting.
For one thing, Soderbergh's stylistic choices and fragmented narrative hook serve The Girlfriend Experience very well. The narrative, such as it is, is micro in structure: Chelsea / Christine (Grey) is an escort who provides all of the trappings of being in a long-term relationship for her clients: they go out on dates, talk about business and friends, and sometimes end up sleeping together. Her actual boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos) is a freelance trainer looking to expand his business horizons, and they seem to maintain a normal relationship despite the fact that very little time is spent together.
In fact, the subtext of The Girlfriend Experience is one of the factors the film has going for it: most of Chelsea's clients complain about the economic crisis, and it becomes a pervasive thread for the first half of the 76 minute run time, but it never occurs to them that hiring a pre-fabricated "girlfriend" isn't the best way to alleviate their situation. At the same time, Chelsea and Chris are essentially doing the same thing: for a fee, they pretend to be your friend, your confidant, your sounding board. Just because the idea of an escort is more salacious than a personal trainer doesn't change the fact that they're trading money for temporary loyalty.
The Girlfriend Experience doesn't hit you over the head with this, and just at the point where you think it might, Soderbergh begins playing with the narrative threads he's asked you to juggle, so that certain ambiguities about Chelsea's business encounters become clearer. The film doesn't so much end as it drops you off, which actually makes it preferable to me in lieu of a more formulaic ending.
Since verisimilitude and understatement are the name of the game here, the cast is accordingly not "showy". Grey, in fact, is served very well by the fact that it doesn't feel like she's acting, or if she is, then it's a very natural performance. To be honest, I haven't seen any of her work (although I'm willing to bet at least Cranpire has), so I'm basing her performance strictly on what I saw in the film, but she didn't strike me as cold or emotionless, judgments lobbied in the film's direction upon release. Santos is also very good, although he plays the more outgoing and verbally effusive half of the couple.
Other characters come and go, and in order to preserve the narrative's disjointed structure, Soderbergh wisely uses actors with voices that mislead the audience into thinking Chelsea is talking to one character rather than another. By the end of the film, each client is clearly defined and has their own distinguishing characteristics, but I felt he left some room for healthy confusion when setting up two critical character moments for Chelsea.
In the end, I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed The Girlfriend Experience. It works as a slice of "real life", but doesn't feel inhibited by a standard narrative structure. At the same time, the film never feels showy or ostentatious. Soderbergh uses his considerable experience to tell a small story in a believable way with a cast that never oversells the material. The Girlfriend Experience is a short movie, but I never felt it lacked something, and at the end I was glad to have seen it. Now I need to catch its "studio" corollary, The Informant! when that hits dvd / Blu-Ray, plus Soderbergh's epic Che from 2008. Odds are I'll really like one of them, and if I'm lucky, both.
* I actually wrote a paper about Soderbergh becoming an auteur by trying very hard not to be one a few years ago, but it's not good enough to merit sharing here.
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