Review of Girlfriend Experience (2008) by Josh S — 14 Jul 2009

All of Steven Soderbergh's films are about transactions of one thing or another. He makes blockbusters of joyous artifice and experiments of joyless transactional confession. The ones that aren't (like Erin Brockovich) are essentially (O.C.) transactions of commercial merit for artistic freedom. His masterpieces from both these worlds are sex, lies, and videotape and Out of Sight (where two transactors find something real) and The Limey (where what is found can never be returned). The Girlfriend Experience is an evocation of his themes, gorgeously shot and edited, explicitly about a world of transaction in which nothing is real and everything is for sale. But it's more than simply saying that nothing is real and everything is for sale. It's that it's being offered. At a certain point, how can you say no when you can have everything personal now? Especially when the ability to offer is power?

There is an innate pull to that which is private, that which is confessional and intimate. Soderbegh does it very well but in The Girlfriend Experience it cannot sustain an entire movie or hide that what Soderbergh rejects in the editing process is failed morality, empowered fake sexy weakness. The world between real and fake offers leaves the world in ruins. It's not cool, it's scary. The Girlfriend Experience is cool in collapse, but what it collapses into is the hug it denies itself.

I can't d Worth seeing as a film but more worth rejecting as an idea. Succeeds as triumph of RedOne.