The Girlfriend Experience

Most people consider Steven Soderberh a man with two modes: commercial and artistic. I’d opt for a third category (or at the very least a subsection of the latter). He has his collection of blockbuster hits (think Ocean’s Eleven) and his epically polarizing artistic experiments (think Che, all 5 hours of it) but in addition to his grand scale art indulgences he has a mounting collection of equally unique lo-fi art gems (think Bubble) shot on digital video with hardly any working budget and absolutely no recognizable stars. The Girlfriend Experience falls into this third category. Not just an artistic work but one of Soderbergh’s extreme art works which seem opposed to the pleasure principle of cinema and exist only to toy with an audience on an intellectual scale. While Bubble was a triumph of fly-on-the-wall aesthetics and environment submersion (with a compelling murder mystery twist), The Girlfriend Experience is a frigid, off-putting and utterly cold to the touch cinema experience offering minimal narrative and even thinner character portraits.

The film’s heroine, Chelsea (Sasha Grey), is an upscale escort living and working in New York during the period leading up to the 2008 election. We also meet her boyfriend who works as a personal trainer for the city’s elite. Both workers are luxuries for the hard-working and entitled, a social class significantly preoccupied with economic downturn. If you’ve ever wanted to be given a front row seat to prattling stockbrokers in a private jet bitching about their money losses…you’re in for a treat!

Like all things Soderbergh films, The Girlfriend Experience is beautiful to look at. And despite some controversy over her adult film past, Sasha Grey is a perfectly able lead. The problem is her character is such a blank slate, and each encounter she has with a client is such a monotonous and unspectacular business transaction, that the experience of watching her feels futile. This is a remarkably antiseptic and unsexy film not really about sex as the press materials suggest but about American industry in an era of decline. That sex amounts to little more than common industry is its basic, highly unoriginal conceit. Any deeper insight is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is short-sightedness or perhaps Soderbergh really has crafted a piece so slight it can run a sparse 80 minutes and hardly make a dent in one’s psyche.

Grade: C