Loading ...The Girlfriend Experience review
It’s about time for the US to address its deepening financial woes through the medium of film and who better than that dissector of technologically mediated perversity, Mr Steven Soderburgh, fresh from his Cuban revolutionary campaign. What The Girlfriend Experience is not however, is a glossy indictment of the inquities of the labour market à la Erin Brockovitz, nor is it a mere Manhatten sex romp pumping its twenty-one-year-old porn star for cachet. Rather, what we get is an ultimately vapid piece of film-making that fiddles its own camera at the expense of the viewer.
Soderburgh attempts to recreate (or simply record?) the life of a girlfriend-for-hire in the midst of the economic collapse and presidential campaigning of October 2008. The urge to exchange (financially and otherwise) dominates life in this film. Chelsea’s (Sasha Grey) careful calculation of her attire and her frequent marketing consultations (not to mention a potentially lucrative journalistic endeavour) clearly mark the centrality of money to this woman, as well as to those around her.
The pivotal crisis of the film focuses on Chelsea’s quasi-occultish infatuation with one of her clients who, to her boyfriend’s chagrin, invites her to spend the weekend with him. Writers David Levien and Brian Koppelmann may be having a little fun here as the only distinguishing characterisics he possesses is that of being the best ride she has had for over a year, and (of course), the fact that he is a screenwriter…
Tying the narrative together are two journey narratives, one of the boyfriend (Chris Santos) travelling with one of his personal training clients in a private plane bedecked with Corona and stock-brokers. Filmed with a toy camera, not unlike the one that Soderburgh himself holds, the characters record themselves in their carefree descent to Vegas while the market collapses and they bet on the outcome of the presidential election. The other journey (we discover later) is that of Chelsea’s untimely return from her transgressive weekend, her head poised with an obviously calculated ennui.
The documentary-style techniques Soderburgh employs, mixed with art-house aesthetics, fail either to engage the viewer in any meaningful way or to effect any Brechtian distanciation that might point to a deeper critical aspect of the film. The coldness with which we experience Soderburgh’s world of call-girls and bankers is presented as prescisely that world we all inhabit, in which exchange and degradation are omnipresent. Further, no way out is possible in this reified world of North Amercian greed.
This does not however elicit any condemnation or consternation from the film, rather the only hope we seem to be left with is the imputed resilience of the American dream to overcome all obstacles. This is made clear in the final scene of the film in which Chelsea continues her work, in spite of supposed emotional trauma, with the bearing of a true pro. Indeed. More disturbingly perhaps, this attitude seems to persist in Sasha Grey’s own attitude towards life, as she said in a Q & A session after the movie: “I do think that everything in life is a transaction, we need to give something to get something in return.”
