The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

If you like Soderbergh's more challenging, smaller scale, experimental work, you'll find a lot to love about The Girlfriend Experience. If you're just showing up for porn star Sasha Grey, save yourself the 10 bucks unless you really want to see the girl act. She actually delivers a natural, credible performance as an escort who isn't nearly as sophisticated as she thinks she is.

Told in a fractured, back and forth manner, the narrative is slight and challenging, but the jumbled chronology galvanizes your focus on what's happening. This isn't just the story of a call girl, it's really about loneliness, disconnectedness and the commodification of everything in the modern world, including love.

Soderbergh is often a detached filmmaker, but this is one of his most emotionally resonant pictures since Solaris. The feeling is subtle, but it's there.

This is also one of the most beautifully photographed films of the year.

The need to love and be loved, to know and be known, suggests director Steven Soderbergh (Bubble), is so deeply and powerfully embedded in human nature that we will do almost anything to get it. We will even pay for it, whether to a therapist, to a personal trainer like Chris, or to a $2,000 an hour "escort" girl like Chelsea who provides sex, of course, but mainly therapy to very wealthy but deeply lonely men. Mainly they talk to Chelsea, about all the things you'd talk about in a "real" relationship. She pretends to offer that and they believe they receive it, and woe to both parties when they drop their guard and transgress business boundaries to reveal themselves to each other as real human beings rather than as partners in a transaction. Since human love is one of the few things you can't buy, Chelsea and her clients seek something they can't get and forfeit their closest approximations in what they already have.

Buy The Girlfriend Experience (2009) Now

The sole intent of a business is to provide a commodity for the consumer. A young escort named Chelsea (Sasha Grey) is herself a commodity for rich men who, for all intents and purposes, want the same basic thing: Companionship. Some want to go to the movies. Many want to wine and dine her at pricey restaurants. Sex can be involved, but according to what we're shown, Chelsea's clients are much more interested in airing their financial grievances and persuading her to vote in specific ways during the 2008 Presidential campaign. They also seem quite fascinated with the idea of discovering the "real" Chelsea, which is probably why they often ask her so many questions about what she does for a living. But is it possible to "know" her? As she says, "If they wanted to know the real me, they wouldn't be paying." For an escort, it's not about reality, but about creating the illusion of reality.

Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" operates on complex but relatable notions of humanity, specifically how money can be such a motivating factor. Neither Chelsea nor her clients delude themselves into believing that theirs is a lasting relationship. Indeed, her cool attitude and monotone voice make it clear that it's all about making a transaction and nothing more. She claims to be an escort in a committed relationship, but judging by the way she regards her boyfriend of a year and a half, Chris (Chris Santos), the idea is open for debate; Chris is a personal trainer, and like Chelsea, he wants to be successful at what he does. Do they love each other? Who knows? They live together, but there's never a moment of passion or even basic friendliness. Even when they argue, there's no conviction in what they say to one another.

There may, in fact, be only one client she's willing to pursue at a more personal level. He's not like the others. He actually listens. He's miles apart from the operator of an escort reviewing website, who was willing to write her a good review in exchange for sex. Chris doesn't exactly fit into this scenario, which is ironic since he's her actual boyfriend while her clients are merely paying to pretend to be her boyfriend. They pay for a Girlfriend Experience while Chris gets it for free. Then again, maybe he doesn't; he's offered the chance to join a group of friends for a guys-only weekend in Las Vegas, and considering his relationship with Chelsea, it's easy to understand why he decides to go.

What this movie does so well is reveal character without making it obvious. It's not so much in the dialogue but in the actions and subtle mannerisms. Chelsea, thin and tall with long dark hair, is both beautiful and irresistibly mysterious. She's dedicated and competitive, and we occasionally watch her take notes about her latest date--what she wore, who the clients were, what they did, what they said, etc. More to the point, she knows how to make herself seem interesting to the opposite sex, and she's darn good at making them feel important. She will listen to them talk, and she will respond when appropriate. She will do these things because providing a Girlfriend Experience is her job.

The challenge for the audience is to discover this while working through the film's experimental style. Scenes are played out of sequence. The structure doesn't have a traditional beginning, middle, and end. The dialogue seems almost entirely adlibbed, which is to say that there are a lot of interruptions and moments of hesitation. It was shot with a RedOne camera, which gives the whole thing the look and feel of a documentary. And yet, once the pieces fall into place, we realize that it's been telling us a deceptively simple story, not one of love or happiness but of basic human nature. We go through life knowing we're good at something, and at a certain point, we must provide our services with the rest of the world for a fee. Sasha Grey is the perfect actress to convey this message, given her background in pornography, another business that makes money by creating illusions.

Movies in general are about creating illusions, just as much as they are about providing them to audiences. "The Girlfriend Experience" understands this, which is why I was able to buy into the illusion. It's an unconventional but highly intriguing slice of life about people, not merely a story about characters. We're being asked to watch, and I don't mean we have to keep our eyes on the screen--we really have to watch everything that's going on, from the way shots are set up to what the shots are supposed to reveal. We have to pay close attention to what everyone is saying, not merely because it's important but also because what they say sounds as natural as actual conversing. We have to invest in Chelsea despite the fact that she presents only what her clients want her present. Like the men in her life, we try to discover the "real" her while knowing all too well that such a thing isn't possible. The pleasure of her company isn't personal. It's strictly business.

Read Best Reviews of The Girlfriend Experience (2009) Here

I was sucked in by the movie poster. I loved the picture of Grey with the big sunglasses looking down at what I thought would be cell phone (she was actually counting money). It could be in a history book 100 years from now illustrating our addiction to information and fashionably big shades in the early part of this century. That photo is literally worth 1,000 words. I'd read about Sasha Grey in Rolling Stone a few months back and I typically load my rental queue with the DVDs that are hard to find. Because of the short length (75 minutes), this has an MTV reality show feel to it. By the way, I avoid reality shows where the focus is on rich, young Californians and their problems. "Girlfriend" works for me though. We can learn a lot from people from different walks of life even when we don't share the same values.

Cinematically, the cityscape is as beautifully shot as Lost in Translation. Both movies share a lot of solitude. It is not as plotless as other reviews say but it does run out of sequence to pique your interest. Chelsea is mechanical but well played by Grey who seems to have hope for an acting career after porn.

If this spoils the movie for you, consider this a warning. Chelsea's clients seem to want her company for a wide range of reasons. Mostly they want someone to listen to them. Don't we all? I was most interested in the values dynamic between her real boyfriend and her career. Having been there (loving someone who is still playing the field), I was most intrigued by Chelsea's greed leading her to go off the meter with a client, losing both her boyfriend and the client (married) in the process. Off the meter or not, Chelsea went on a spending spree prior to the weekend getaway where the guy calls to apologize for his cold feet and abandons her. Chelsea's boyfriend (a personal trainer in a gym) seems more connected to his client's emotions than Chelsea is to hers. The boyfriend pitches the idea of saving money by buying a bigger block of workouts to a gym client while making references to their relationship lasting. He actually refers to the "future" of the relationship.

Try to get too much, and you'll spill the cart and have nothing. Try to own too little, and you're left alone as Chelsea's boyfriend was after getting increasingly possessive about her extracurriculars. In this year of cheaters getting scalded by scorned women (Steve McNair, Tiger Woods etc.) I was paying close attention. What I got out of it was this: Whether you put all your stock in one person, or many: you'd best always be prepared to be alone.

Looking at my queue list, this will remain one of the more memorable movies but I can't give it 4 stars because it's just too thin on content. In a more typical movie plot, Chelsea would have been faced with real danger and perhaps a third act would have her getting help or closure. Instead we see her have one awkward exchange after another with men who never made time to become socially... suave. Awkward conversations with quirky people seem to be a staple in modern indy films. I like this.

Want The Girlfriend Experience (2009) Discount?

Businessmen like paying for things because it gives them a sense of power. According to Soderbergh, its not the paying clients who get confused about the nature of professional relationships (including those involving various forms of payed intimacy), its the call girl who gets confused.

In Solaris, everyone is confused about the nature of their intimate relationships, and everyone lives in their own solipsistic fantasy worlds where others are just projections from their own subconscious. In this film, all the men seem to understand the illusory nature of relationships and accept that; its the call girl who is, ironically, the only one who holds out hope for a genuine human connection.

The male characters like paying for what they want, and the most interesting male client, the journalist, is paying not for the call girl's body but for her story, her truth. The problem is that she doesn't have any "story" or "truth." She is so used to becoming what other men want her to be, that she no longer knows the difference between authentic and manufactured experiences/intimacies. She's become the perfect actress, a kind of blank slate upon which any man can write anything at all. Its a tragedy if there can be anything like tragedy in this postmodern world.

Soderbergh is exploring Godardian terrain here but not really extending our understanding of that terrain as Godard was already postmodern. At least with Godard, the solipsistic characters at least had the ability to grasp the tragic nature of their inauthentic (because always scripted by others) existence. In Soderbergh the characters are not afforded such privileged glimpses of self.

Save 12% Off