November 17, 2009 -- “The Girlfriend Experience” is a sort of experimental soft porn art film about a high-priced escort working in New York around the time of the 2008 Presidential Election. This is directed by A-List Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh, who might have easily paid for this film out of a small fraction of the profits from his blockbuster “Oceans 11” trilogy of films. A lot of directors, George Lucas included, say they want to make these kinds of little art films, but few successful directors actually make them. Soderbergh is an exception.

This film really has the wrong name. It isn't “The Girlfriend Experience,” it is “The Girlfriend Business.” Chelsea (played adult film star Sasha Grey) seems to be hiring herself out as a girlfriend to rich, lonely men. She is also in a “committed relationship” with her boyfriend, Chris (played by Chris Santos) a personal exercise trainer. The film makes prostitution of this sort look pretty good. It reminded me of the case of Brooke Magnanti, the famous London call girl who put herself through college and became a doctor, a research scientist, in fact, at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. Magnanti wrote “Diary of a London Call Girl” and was widely known as the “Belle de Jour” blogger. She has inspired many young women to consider prostitution as a way towards self-fulfillment. This film, on the other hand, paints prostitution in a little less glamorous light, but not much less.

We see Chelsea during her $2,000 per hour “appointments,” dressed in the finest clothes and jewelry. Then we see her discussing her clients with another call girl at lunch. She also discusses them with a journalist (played by Mark Jacobson, who is, in fact, a journalist) who is working on a story about her. Chelsea seems to be cruising along pretty well until she has an unpleasant encounter with a sleazy “Erotic Connoisseur” (Glenn Kenny) which upsets her greatly. Is this the first sleazebag she's ever encountered in this business? Lucky girl.

Chelsea also meets with a web designer and business people trying to increase the profits from her call girl business. Other than that, however, she seems to have no future plans for herself nor for Chris. She is not planning, for instance, to go to college. She just wants more money. She's not inspirational. We see Chelsea screening potential clients by phone. She seems to go by certain rules (they have to have used an escort service before) her instincts, and by the applicant's birth date. Her belief in evaluating people based on their birthdate is not astrology, she claims, but of course it amounts to the same thing.

Chelsea agrees to go off for a romantic weekend with a married man based mainly on his birthdate, which infuriates Chris. This bright plan works out pretty much as one would expect. If you can't trust a person's birthdate, how are you supposed to decide anything? Men in the film, including the journalist, make a big deal out of Chelsea's looks, and she is pretty. However, this is a kind of soft porn movie so I was wondering just what is under all those expensive threads. We finally get a look when she takes off her clothes at the end of the film to embrace a jeweler, and whoa! These guys are overpaying by a lot! That is a whole lot of money for so little. O.K., so I'm sexist, but this subject is fair game. This is a film specifically about selling one's body, if not one's soul, for money, and a great deal of time in the movie is spent in discussions about Chelsea's body and how she looks, as opposed to how she feels.

If it isn't Chelsea's body they're after, these guys must be paying for the girlfriend experience. She must have a great personality, but it didn't really come across that way. She didn't seem to have a lot of empathy for these clients and the coversation wasn't exactly scintilating, either. She did keep asking them about their wives and children, just to be chatty, but if I was a client, that would creep me out. There are several other storylines in the film, including one about a group of guys going to Las Vegas, which didn't seem to really have any point to it and it didn't have much to do with the rest of the film, either. There is also a little side plot about Chris trying to make more money in the bodybuilding business against the background of a failing economy.

All of this is shot like a documentary film. The camera is often static, like it was set on a tripod and left, often at low angles. It made me feel like I was evesdropping on conversations and watching from behind furniture like a voyeur. It is an effective technique for making the film seem like cinéma vérité. The dialog has a very authentic feel to it, such as the conversation between Chris and his boss about money. It turns out that the dialog in the film was largely improvised during rehearsals. While these parts of the film seemed realistic, they also suffer from the dullness of ordinary coversation. They lack the sparkle of well-crafted dialog by a good screenwriter. The pace of the film is also slow, adding to its rather mundane feel. There is also little drama because nothing much really happens. It is an interesting low-budget cinematic experiment, but I just couldn't work up much enthusiasm for it. The experiment may have been a success, but the subject is dead. It rates a C.

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Copyright © 2009 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
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