Out and out rave in Variety for the new Soderbergh film
The Girlfriend Experience A Magnolia Pictures release and presentation, in association with 2929 Entertainment, of an Extension 765 production. Produced by Gregory Jacobs. Executive producers, Todd Wagner, Marc Cuban. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Screenplay, Brian Koppelman, David Levien.
With: Sasha Grey, Chris Santos, Philip Eytan, Glenn Kenny, Timothy Davis, David Levien, Marc Jacobsen.
By RONNIE SCHEIBWith characteristic eclecticism, Steven Soderbergh follows "Che," his sweeping four-hour epic about a revolutionary hero, with "The Girlfriend Experience," a small-scale, digitally shot 77-minute chamber piece about a high-priced prostitute. Despite the pic's erotic subject matter and star (vet porn diva Sasha Grey), nothing could be less sensationalistic -- or moralistic -- than this fascinating study of free enterprise in free fall. While it may disappoint thrill-seekers, "Girlfriend" should still delight Soderbergh fans and niche auds. Sundance-sneaked (in rough cut) and officially preeming at Tribeca before a May 22 opening, this arthouse gem finds the helmer in top, and truly topical, form. Pic follows upscale call girl Chelsea (Grey, in an interestingly opaque perf) and her trainer boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) over five chronologically scrambled days in the weeks before the 2008 election. Set in the trendy, low-lit haunts of New York's high rollers (the venues looking far sleeker and more anonymous than in the bright pastels of "Sex and the City" and other glossy Gotham fantasies), the pic presents a society in which every interaction reps a form of commodity exchange.
Everything is a brand: Chelsea advertises herself on her website, while her apparel designers figure more prominently than her johns in her journal (read in voiceover). Everybody has a get-rich scheme: Chris tries to shop himself around at various gyms and hawks a line of sports clothes on the side, while Chelsea yearns to own a boutique and quizzes her clients about recession-proof investments.
Soderbergh's complex, never-gimmicky shuffling of time subtly fragments the narrative to reveal the characters' untoward depths of self-delusion. Sometimes the irony proves less subtle, as in Chelsea's back-room encounter with the Erotic Connoisseur, a super-sleazy porn reviewer (portrayed convincingly by former Premiere critic Glenn Kenny) who mercilessly disses her charms in cyberspace, the narration of his review counterpointed by street muscians' rousing rendition of "Everyone's a Critic."
Like Godard, Soderbergh views prostitution as the ultimate paradigm for capitalism. But where Godard saw the hooker as a tragic or exploited victim ("My Life to Live," "Two or Three Things I Know About Her"), Soderbergh suggests there are no victims, only failed traders, in the post-Reagan era of DIY capitalism. Subverting the helmer's own megabuck "Ocean's" franchise, "Girlfriend" exposes the downside to those films' shiny, expensive stars and money-snatching thrills ("Ocean's Thirteen" was penned by "Girlfriend" scripters Brian Koppelman and David Levien).
Furthermore, in contrast to "Bubble," Soderbergh's earlier HD experiment with an other-end-of-the-telescope dissection of lower-class specimens, the helmer here wields total control of the pic's uniquely detached, seriocomic tone. The nervous hype of a group of hedge-fund managers, who insist on treating Chris to a private-jet weekend in Vegas, seems organically connected to the handheld camera swinging wildly from one partygoer to the next.
Chelsea, meanwhile, is a creature of cool surfaces and static interiors, ensconced in tony galleries, pricey restaurants and luxurious hotel rooms as she delivers the full "girlfriend experience" -- complete with thoughtful inquiries about clients' wives and kiddies, informed appreciation of "Man on Wire" and commiseration over the nose-diving economy.
Tech credits mesh faultlessly, as Soderbergh lensed and edited under his usual pseudonyms. Score by Morcheeba's Ross Godfrey hits all the rightly stressful notes.
Magnolia Pictures presents a film directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Running time: 77 minutes. Rated R (for sexual content, nudity and language). Opening today at Landmark Century.
by Roger Ebert
This film is true about human nature. It clearly it sees needs and desires. It is not universal, but within its particular focus, it is unrelenting. Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" is about a prostitute and her clients. In such a relationship, the factor of money makes the motives fairly direct on both sides.
In the language of escort advertising, "GFE" promises a "girlfriend experience." Sometimes sex may not even be involved, although it is implicitly permitted. A man seeking a girlfriend experience offers to pay for companionship, conversation -- having another human being in his life. The women offering a GFE are acting a role, but in some ways, it can be therapeutic. We know what sexual surrogates do. A "girlfriend" may be playing a human surrogate.
The film involves a woman named Chelsea (Sasha Grey) and the men in her life. She has been living with one of them for 18 months, and in a way, he may be a boyfriend experience. He doesn't seem much more meaningful to her than a client. The other men are of various ages and backgrounds, but they all have one thing in common: They are wealthy, and Chelsea is not inexpensive. Typically, they take her to an expensive restaurant and then a luxury hotel. They may send a limousine for her.
We listen to them talking. We watch them talking. Most of them want to talk about what she does for a living. There is the polite fiction that she is talking about other men, hypothetical men, and not the one she is with. They like to give her advice about how to invest her money, and who to vote for (the story takes place during the 2008 campaign). Each one has some reason for thinking he is somehow special. Set during the run-up to the stock market crash, it shows both sides more interested in investing than sex.
These men don't want a girlfriend experience. They want a boyfriend experience. They want to feel as if they're on a date. They will be listened to. Their amazing comments will be smiled at. Their hair will be tousled. They will be kidded. They have told Chelsea about their wives and children, and she remembers their names. They can kiss her. There is no illusion that they are leaving their wives, and none that she wants them to. She simply empowers them to feel younger, more looked up to, more clever, than they are.
What draws a powerful man to pay for a women outside of marriage? It's not the sex. In fact, sex is the beard, if you know what I mean. By paying money for the excuse of sex, they don't have to say: I am lonely. I am fearful. I am growing older. I am not loved. My wife is bored with me. I can't talk to my children. I'm worried about my job, which means nothing to me. Above all, they are saying: Pretend you like me.
The film was written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Believe it or not, the same two wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh's "Ocean's Thirteen." I imagine the three of them sitting around on the "Ocean's" set and asking, "What could we be doing instead of this?"
Chelsea is played by Sasha Grey. She is 21. Since 2006, according to IMDb, she's made 161 porn films, of which only the first title can be quoted here: "Sasha Grey Superslut." No, here's another, which makes me smile: "My First Porn #7." I haven't seen any of them, but now I would like to see one, watching very carefully, to see if she suggests more than one level.
Grey wasn't hired because of her willingness to have sex onscreen; there's no explicit sex in the movie and only fleeting nudity. I suspect Soderbergh cast her because of her mercenary approach to sex -- and her acting talent, which may not be ready for Steppenwolf but is right for this film. She owns her own agency and Web site, manages other actresses, has a disconnect between herself and what she does for a living. So does Chelsea.
The film is intent on her face. It often looks over the shoulder of her clients. She projects precise amounts of interest and curiosity, but conceals real feelings. It is a transaction, and she is holding up her end. Notice the very small nods and shakes of her head. Observe her word choices as she sidesteps questions without refusing to answer them. When her roommate/boyfriend insists on knowing the name of one of her clients, she is adroit in her reply.
Once she allows her mask to slip: a surprising moment when she reveals what she may feel. Grey perfectly conveys both her hope and her disappointment, keeping both within boundaries. You wonder how a person could look another in the eye and conceal everything about themselves. But the financial traders who are her clients do it every day. Their business is not money, but making their clients feel better about themselves.
Posts: 5462 | Location: Kirkland, WA | Registered: March 13, 2006
The Girlfriend Experience is one of Steven Soderbergh's bite-size, semi-improvised, shot-on-DV doodles (like Bubble or Full Frontal), and it's the best one he's made. As it opens, we see jagged medium-range shots of a man and a woman murmuring to each other in a taxi, a fancy low-lit bar, and a bedroom. By the time they wake up, we've more or less decided that they're a couple. Only they're not. The guy is some sort of wealthy finance dude, and the girl is a high-end escort who provides not just sex but conversation, canoodling over late-night wine, and morning-after chitchat — the illusion of intimacy.
Shot during the early days of the economic crisis, The Girlfriend Experience is a mysterious and arresting look at how the culture of money turns love and desire into something you want to control. The escort, Chelsea, is played by Sasha Grey, a real-life adult-video star who is not so much a natural actress as a natural-born placid, affectless Barbie doll (imagine Eliot Spitzer consort Ashley Dupré with a touch of Demi Moore). The movie has the fascination of a documentary about a fictional character. Chelsea, with her ambitious teasing blankness, occupies the center of a crumbling mosaic of money, status, deception, and manipulated lust. We see her out with her clients; bickering with her live-in lover (Chris Santos), a gym trainer who pretends her job doesn't bother him; and in meetings, some sinister, that promise to advance her career. Chelsea's clients all seek ''the girlfriend experience,'' but they aren't alone; she, too, tries to barter herself into romance. Soderbergh has captured an America in which the line between selling out and selling yourself has never been thinner. (Available on cable via on demand) A
Posts: 27165 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
"A movie is not good because it arrives at conclusions you share, or bad because it does not. A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it: about the way it considers its subject matter, and about how its real subject may be quite different from the one it seems to provide." - Roger Ebert, from the introduction to "Awake in the Dark" (2006)
