Review of The Girlfriend Experience (2009) by Cita W — 08 Jun 2010

The Girlfriend Experience is about a young woman working as an escort for high-echelon New York City businessmen. She offers them the eponymous experience, where they can pretend, to themselves and to others, that she actually cares about them. Her problem is that as a professional faker, the real world beckons: The financial crisis is at its apex, and she has no understanding of it on which to form any opinion. She is a purely career-minded professional woman, and her other half is a conventional yuppie as well, a personal trainer trying to make a living, struggling with the same problems with his own clients, who only want to pay for short-term plans because of the economy. The way things begin to look, the only way either of them can really get ahead is by giving all that's left of themselves that they have to give.

Steven Soderbergh, a versatile, prolific and decidedly experimental filmmaker, transgresses to achieve the documentary rendering of the world of 21st century business that many filmmakers would, understandably, feel the need to dramatize in such a way that would make the characters more emotionally relatable. Soderbergh approaches edgy, difficult subject matter such as the life of a call girl, the recent economic downturn, the 2008 presidential election and the nitty-gritty of the young urban professional's problems and fears, and he does it with unapologetic pragmatism. By sacrificing the universality of emotional involvement, he coerces the viewer into a simply take-it-or-leave-it experience of literal and particular focus.

He is his own pseudonymous cinematographer as usual, and captures the actions of his subjects with an unfeeling and unadorned economy, almost transparently practicing with his new toy, the RedOne, a relatively inexpensive progressive-scan camera, fresh to the vanguard of cinema technology, that allows the same depth of field and field of view as the traditional 35mm format. And with this efficient consumer camcorder concentrates from afar on what are usually either listless chats or admirably candid political debates from a rear view, the out-of-focus camera appearing more interested in the modern interior design of the countless crème-de-la-crème cafes and restaurants, brand names and foyers, implying an absolutely unbiased look at whatever is occurring as that is not being focused on. The sometimes ambient, sometimes spare music intermittently comes and goes, cutting discourteously and in one scene fading into a street performer's song rather than a personal soundtrack for Chelsea. This and Soderbergh's camera function jaggedly to lulls us into the premise of a character's subjective point-of-view before a burst of energizing visual style and loud percussion explodes back into the ordinary hollowness, as if cranking up the volume on an upbeat track and swiftly removing the headphones, making the silence louder, the mundanities more emboldened. Soderbergh's trademark editing style has us hear Chelsea's seemingly random voice-over descriptions of her clients, their fleeting appointments and what she wore for them. This is an analysis of, not a journey through.

Nevertheless, the film ultimately sneaks up on you with a strange sensory impact. By the end, we feel numbed by some sort of catharsis. There may not be any attempt on Soderbergh's part, or by his screenwriters, the very talented Brian Koppelman and David Levien, to expose the film's people as characters rather than subjects, but that is its key. Money is the language everyone here speaks that betrays what they feel: Why does an affluent family man to buy a temporary woman? Is it really just the sex? Soderbergh doesn't reveal or even suggest his subjects' feelings with close-ups or rehearsed pauses, but leaves it to us to read them the way we would in real life, and we read the escort's clients, we see that what they really want is to feel like they're on a date with her. She will listen to them. She'll muss their hair. Their brilliant zingers will be appreciated with laughter, smiles, affection. They'll be teased. And by paying money for the pretext of sex---they may sleep with her, they may not---they don't have to say or even imply that they feel lonely, scared, unloved. That they are aging and their wives have grown out of them. That they don't know how to communicate with their kids.

Sasha Grey, whose interest in the role and Soderbergh's interest in her evidently stems from her own fascination with French New Wave cinema, does not appear to have been cast as a gimmick, but as an element of Soderbergh's go-for-broke intention of realism. A college-age woman who's done over a hundred porn movies is going to innately bear the confident and unashamed willingness to objectify herself for a living, as is the nature of her character, who is actually not explicitly sexual and only occasionally nude. More focally, she shows proper levels of attentiveness and concern to her clients and her boyfriend, though still buries true emotions. She is fulfilling her role in an exchange. The utter execution of naturalism and the vagueness of emotion were off-putting to some critics. One talked about her performance by asking how one can tell the difference between an unskilled actor's flat performance and a skilled actor realistically playing a flat character. I tend to find the difference between the former and Sasha Grey's lies in the strikingly minute nods and shakes of her head, her extemporaneous avoidance of questions without declining to respond. Another critic said something I cannot improve upon: that this is "no date movie." Yes, in between a four-hour epic about Che Guevara and a cheeky caper film starring Matt Damon, Soderbergh slips in an extremely short but atmospherically grave microfilm of an estranged young woman who follows the new self-packaging culture to its mental, and certainly its physical, boundaries.