The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

Very Cool!!!

That was an excellent one.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

I have always – liked – the way elites hide their perversions behind their own vocabulary and the sake for art! Here the movie is about the oldest job in the world: for the common people, it's prostitute or hooker but for those elites, it becomes an escort! As always, we have a pretty idyllic, intellectual depiction of the job (in France, we have terribly poor but critically acclaimed Ozon that says that every girl loves to be a prostitute!). Whereas this reality is about sex and money, the movie actually closes its eyes upon it! Worst, as our famous french DSK told us, those privileged husbands recruit prostitutes to deal with their sexual fantasies they fail to do with their wife! Here, the escort is shamefully a gentle shoulder to chat, almost like a babysitter!Instead to depict what it is really, the movie is an endless babble, documentary style about the American life (rather nightmare!): so it speaks about money, business, invest project, Vegas to have fun (understand orgies), cocaine for fun, sports center and fitness trainer, brand clothes (understand a name for each piece)… Honestly, should I live in that world (that comes closer and closer in France), I would finish crazy so much it's a material world, without inspiration or values… Visually, the movie is just awful as it's the usual actual blue / orange cinematography… The editing is stupid because deconstructing the time-line is the cheap tool to directors that have no inspiration… At the end, this movie is just garbage, endless headache (even if it's only 76 minutes)… But, there is Sasha! It's nice to see her with clothes on and bringing her nice smile to do quiet scene: honestly, she saves the movie all by herself because with another casting, it would have been pure s…t !

I first saw the well-known former XXX hardcore porn star in the low budget terrible horror film Smash Cut, and this film from director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brocjovich, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven) sounded like her kind of territory, and a return to the director's Sex, Lies, and Videotape beginnings. Basically, set during the time of the 2008 Presidential Election, between Barack Obama and John McCain, in the city of Manhattan, the story centres around the life of high class call girl and escort Chelsea, real name Christine (Sasha Grey), and the many challenges she faces between work and her personal life. Chelsea charges $2,000 an hour for all clients from all backgrounds, and for that she offers the "girlfriend experience" (GFE), where she acts like a girlfriend towards her clients, dressing for what they have in mind, whether it is dinner and a movie, or a hotel meeting, she will listen to their conversations, and with mostly business consumed clients they will mostly talk about work and finances, and of course having sex with them. The story sees five non-consecutive days of her life, she is finding recently that she is not seeing as many clients and wanting to make more money, so she arranges to meet a sleazy Interviewer (Mark Jacobson) who has met many other escorts to give them a review of an experience with them, most getting positive description and boosting their profiles to get more clients, but he says he should get a free session. She also has a boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), who works as a personal trainer and is aware of what she does for a living, but she has promised him she will never go with a client longer than a single night, so she is going against her rule with this suggestion of spending a weekend or longer with the interviewer, but she insists it is for the sake of making more money. Chelsea is devastated in the time we see that she loses one or two clients who have families and feel great guilt wanting to have sex with her, the interviewer gives her a lacklustre review complaining that despite looking beautiful she does not perform all sexual acts as good as other women he has been with, and not getting personal with clients, or talking about what she has been doing with her boyfriend, the only people she can open up to her female friends and one man at a bar who just wants to talk. Also starring Philip Eytan as Phillip, Glenn Kenny as The Erotic Connoisseur, T. Colby Trane as Waiter, Peter Zizzo as Zizzo, Ron Stein as Vegas Buddy #1, David Levien as David, Alan Milstein as Pete, Dennis Shields as Dennis, Marshall Gilman as Vegas Buddy #2 and Michael Roberts as Vegas Buddy #3. I had seen a few of the hardcore videos of Grey before this, so it was certainly interesting to see her play the prostitute character well enough that you can empathise with her to some extent, she is pretty much the only thing you can watch about this film, because many of the clients along the way blend into each other and seem too similar, besides of course the filthy minded interviewer who just exploits and takes advantage of her, the sexual content is not that frequent but is I suppose necessary, there is not enough focus on an engaging story, and it only gets more interesting in the last few scenes when the lead character's conscience and personal life comes into play, so overall it is an alright enough but lukewarm drama. Okay!

To fairly judge The Girlfriend Experience, you have to ask a simple question. What would you think of this movie if it were the product of an unknown filmmaker instead of Steve Soderbergh? My reaction would have been "Wow. This guy's an amazing cinematographer but he doesn't have a bleepin' idea how to tell a story." This thing looks like a Ferrari and runs like a broken down Dodge Dart.Set in the end of 2008 with the financial crisis underway and a Presidential election looming, this non-linear tale bounces through the lives of a young prostitute (Sasha Grey) and the many men she slides around. An escort who offers what is called "the girlfriend experience" where she not only has sex with you but pretends to actually "be" with you for as long as you can afford, she juggles her many clients, a live-in-boyfriend, a journalist trying to pry into her heart and a guy who offers to boost her career in whoredom by giving her a good review on his website that caters to guys who like going to prostitutes.The film skips from moment to moment and back again, circling around the escort and her personal trainer boyfriend (Chris Santos) before settling on a big event. The escort meets a client and is so taken with him at first sight that she agrees to go away with him for the weekend, breaking her professional rules and the trust of her boyfriend. The anticipated getaway goes poorly and she goes back to boinking moderately unattractive dudes for cash.The Girlfriend Experience officially lasts only 77 minutes, but it feels twice that long. It is bereft of energy or momentum and sits on the screen like the slowly melting ice sculpture of a vagina. The script tells you no more about the life of an escort than would the average magazine article and for all the whining and moaning about the economy done by many of the characters here, it tells you less than nothing about the 2008 financial implosion.It certainly looks great, though to no apparent purpose. For example, there's a scene where the escort and her boyfriend are talking in a bar. They're out of focus in the foreground and then the boyfriend goes back to the bar where it's in focus and exchanges a few words with other people there. In shooting it that way, Soderbergh may have been trying to say something about the indistinct and undefined nature of the escort and her boyfriend…or he might have just been dickin' around. I have no idea which it is. There's a lot of stylish imagery here but none of it seems connected to a narrative or even a theme.As for Sasha Grey, while her career as a porn star may be based on her physical accessibility, she's mentally and emotionally impenetrable here. Again, that may be the effect Soderbergh was going for. That doesn't change the fact that looking at Grey is like looking at a porcelain gravy boat.I can only hope that Soderbergh got to "experience" Grey for himself, because otherwise this motion picture wasted the time of literally everyone who made it, just as it will waste the time of anyone who watches it.

Yes, this film was far from perfect, and I definitely don't give it a 10. However, being that it is actually an homage to certain French New Wave films (Namely Agnes Varda's "Cleo From 5 to 7" and Goddard's "Vivre Sa Vie"), it actually does a pretty good job of doing what it came to do. Unfortunately, this type of thing tends to overestimate the intellect of the American audience, hence the "dull" and "boring" reviews that undoubtedly came from people who find anything with subtitles "lame". Please, guys, if you don't get it, do us all a favor, and stick to what you do get, and don't assume that your ignorance of the subject/style makes it a bad film. More than that, though, remember that just because the internet gives you a forum to speak, that doesn't mean you have to use it. Maybe just go watch "Independence Day" again...