Movie Review - The Girlfriend Experience

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Steven Soderbergh’s latest film The Girlfriend Experience focuses on the prostitution industry.  For those of you who use Craigslist for its stated purpose (rather than its intended one), “the girlfriend experience” (or GFE), in prostitution parlance, is an extended visit with a call girl.  It normally involves the trappings of a date: dinner, a movie or a play, cuddling, kissing and, of course, the obvious.  It’s a much more expensive encounter because it consumes more of the escort’s time and intimacy.  Sasha Grey plays Chelsea, a call girl that provides the GFE.  However, she is looking to become a true high-end escort and crack the world of the uber-rich.  She lives with her boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos), a personal trainer looking to move up in his career as well. 

The movie is set against the backdrop of the run-up to the presidential election and the beginning of our economic downturn.  Therefore, many of the conversations center on Obama and the stock market.  Much of the films dialogue is improved which proves problematic.  The film is cast largely with novices who clearly have no idea how improvise dialogue.  There are five basic rules to improve.  (You can see them here.)  If you clicked that link and read the rules, congratulations.  You now know more about improv than anyone in this movie.

The first, and most important, rule in improv is “Don’t Deny”.  A scene can’t move forward if actors negate what the other person has created.  And it happens time and again this film.  There’s a scene early in the film where Chelsea is discussing a revamp of her website with a tech guy.  He’s explaining what he can do to improve her site.  However, he’s making little if any sense.  The problem is, the actor’s subpar improv skills makes it virtually impossible to determine if it’s the actor or the character that doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  It’s a reoccurring theme in the movie.

The Girlfriend Experience centers on the performance of Sasha Grey as Chelsea.  Grey’s been in many movies but this is her first *ahem* mainstream film.  (Let’s just leave it at…don’t Google her when you’re at work.)  Unfortunately, Grey is completely devoid of emotion.  At first I thought this was an artistic choice - an emotionally scarred escort drained of the human spirit.  But as the film went on, I began to question that.

Chelsea’s live-in boyfriend is trying to advance in the personal trainer industry.  He is becoming increasingly jealous as Chelsea becomes more involved with a specific client.  She wants to go away with this client for the weekend even though it violates the mutually agreed upon rules of their relationship.  While he ridicules her for believing she might have a real relationship with a client, he is planning on flying to Las Vegas for a weekend getaway with some clients of his own.  Clearly Soderbergh is trying to compare and contrast their respective careers.  Both spend large amounts of time with their clients; they both have hourly rates; they both have business relationships that masquerade as “friendship” and both are becoming personally involved with a client.  This juxtaposition might have felt more insightful in a better movie.  Instead, it feels less like an observation and more like a parlor trick.  There is little-to-no moral equivalency between helping a client drop a load of weight and helping a client just drop a load.

 Adding to the problem is that Soderbergh tells the story non-sequentially.  It can’t really be called a series of flashbacks since we never really get a firm grasp on when exactly the present is.  Therefore we watch people have fights about things we think happened off camera only to see them happen later in the film.  But there is no framing device to explain these scenes and there is little in the way of visual or audio clues to let us know when the movie will be shifting through time.  It’s almost as if they were about to edit together individual scenes when someone dropped the snippets of film.  And, instead of putting them back in order, they just edited the scenes together in whatever order they happened to be picked up off of the floor. 

The film has a cold, distant feel about it.  This fact, combined with poorly improvised dialogue, amateurish acting and a non-linear timeline leaves you with a pretentious mess of a movie.  The film has the Soderbergh pedigree which will no doubt insulate it from much in the way of criticism.  But it is impressive in one distinct manner.  Soderbergh has managed to achieve the impossible; he made hookers boring.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Leaving Las Vegas and 1 being Angel 4: Undercover, The Girlfriend Experience gets a 4.

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