The Girlfriend Experience

I saw this film last night on its UK premiere at the National Film Theatre (although it had previously been given a preview showing to a sell-out audience during the London Film Festival last month). Sasha Grey, the star of the film, appeared in person at the end and participated in one of the longer Q&A sessions in my, admittedly limited, experience of these events in which she batted away questions, mainly about her adult film career, with the same show of glacial insouciance that her character demonstrates in the film.

The film which is a series of episodic vignettes about the encounters, both professional and personal, of a high-priced Manhattan escort girl set in the run-up to last year's US Presidential election is not really about prostitution either as a means of earning money or as a paradigm for the despair of the human soul.

What it is really about is speed-dating, not as an extra-curricular activity but as a well-rewarded existence. The film opens with Ms Grey leaving a hotel and getting into a car and giving a deadpan account of her previous encounter with a client. She prefaces her remarks by listing her complete outfit down to her underwear since this was obviously part of the client "package" which he has purchased, if only for a short time. This sets the tone of the film as being a triumph of, quite literally, style over substance.

This is a very sanitised world with no violence, no drug-taking and even no cooking although enormous importance is attached to meals, mainly taken in commercial premises, where many important conversations take place with Chelsea describing her situation either to clients, an alternately amused and bemused girlfriend (of the platonic variety), and to a journalist. In Chelsea's profession making intelligent, if superficial, conversation is as, if not more, important than her bedroom gymnastic skills.

Whilst Ms Grey's elegant Ice Maiden, a persona she has exploited with astonishing ability in her adult film roles, is eminently watchable the main weaknesses of the film are the character and the plot. Ms Grey and her personal trainer boyfriend are mismatched and seem to have nothing in common except vapid self-regard.

There is not so much a narrative thread as a series of threads that Soderbergh pulls out then almost immediately lets drop again. The scene with the boyfriend where Chelsea tells him she is thinking of going away for the weekend with a client put me briefly in mind of Paul Snider's jealous murderous rage towards Dorothy Stratten (who emerged from the softcore world of Playboy to be on the brink of a carer as a serious actress before her untimely demise) at the end of Bob Fosse's biopic of that tragic figure, "Star 80", but it is never developed and it never becomes clear whether they patched up their differences or parted company.

The most interesting scene and the one where Chelsea almost has a "Goodbar" moment is an encounter with a blog reviewer of erotic "services", the gelatinous self styled "Erotic Connoisseur" . This stands out in sharp contrast to the rest of the film as the dialogue is sharp and pointed and even witty, provoking laughter in the audience, as relief from the surrounding conversational banality. However part way through the scene fades and we do not learn the denouement until later when she describes it in a conversation with a client.

This is one example of how scenes crucial to the action are discussed rather than depicted. This may have some value in a documentary but it weakens a drama which should have both conflict and resolution and this has neither and instead is a few days in the life of a New York escort girl except Ms Grey isn't an escort girl in reality but portraying one in fiction.

Lastly, we come to Ms Grey herself, who I think will be the major selling point of this film particularly for those who have come across at least some of her other 180-odd films she has appeared in since the age of 18 which will never receive a cinema release. Soderbergh himself makes an ironic reference to this in the final scene where a mountainous Jewish jewellry store owner achieves release by merely being embraced by Ms Grey, clad only in bra and pants, just as many others have achieved release by being electronically embraced by Ms Grey through watching her films.

Ms Grey is the most intriguing figure to come out of the adult film industry and attempt a mainstream crossover since Traci Lords in the mid-1980s. Her svelte, dark-haired willowy appearance stands in sharp contrast to the blowsy, blonde, silicon-assisted features of previous adult film stars who have entered the wider public consciousness in more recent times such as Jenna Jameson.

Could Ms Grey achieve what Dorothy Stratten was on the brink of doing before tragedy intervened and become widely accepted as a mainstream actress? On this evidence she has a long way to go yet but this reviewer will continue to follow her career with interest.

The Girlfriend Experience got headlines due to its casting, sparking discussions over the nature of porn in the mainstream without anyone ever pausing to realise that this film does not represent porn in the mainstream, but rather someone who does porn also doing "proper" acting. I say this because this is not a film about sex or pornography or prostitution but rather one about commodities, trading, money and the nature of relationships where these things are involved. What this translates into in reality is a film that has lots of discussions that provide material on relationships that are some variant on personal, sexual, financial or a mix of all three. In terms of actual plot it must be stated that there is not really a start, middle, end in a traditional narrative sense but rather more of a flow of discussion and characters.

To a point this engages reasonably well because the whole time I was watching it I was working to try and relate what was being said about the business world with what was being shown in regards the escort service. Here and there I made sense of it but too often it seemed to be deliberately hard to grasp or indeed perhaps just not hold together as well as it should have done. Although it is a very short film this work did start to tire me and I'll be honest and say that it didn't really work for me. The film was so clearly "saying" something (as opposed to "doing" something) that it became frustrating to me that it didn't say it clearer and with more conviction. OK so it still mostly held my attention and I understood the obvious narrative parallels between the lives of the various characters in how the "became" something for others in return for money but this is not the same as it working and being as intelligent as it thinks it is – it isn't.

Soderbergh directs with a dimly lit but yet attractive view of things, giving the film a real good feel that would have done well to enforce the material if it had been stronger. The key PR move was of course the casting of Sasha Grey and she does do a really good turn here – although why everyone is shocked about this I'm not sure. There is a school of thought that pornography involves no acting skills at all, usually people think this until they see porn with a woman who cannot act to save her life – it is awful stuff and Grey's adult roles show she can perform there as well as she does here. She has a naturalism and sadness to her character that works well and does both convince and engage. Santos works well with her as he does the same sort of role but in a different trade, while the various clients are all solid turns that don't detract.

The Girlfriend Experience is not that great a film unfortunately. It has much of interest in the visuals, specific dialogue scenes, the parallels in the characters and the casting/performances but it just never comes together in the way one would hope. It is worth seeing because of the nature of it but even with an open mind it is likely that it will not take over you the way that you would want it to.

Here in Australia there is an extraordinary statistic which tells us that the majority of students at the biggest university in the country work in the sex industry. You see, study is expensive. Who wants to slave away at McDonald's for hours after class to buy books and pay off student loans when you can make ten times that much for a fraction of the time spent? There is obviously an interesting movie to be made here. This is not that movie. I knew a girl who paid her way through law school by working as an escort. Any one of her stories about "clients" would be more interesting than this.

As the title implies, Chelsea/Christine, the main character, is an escort who also goes out on dates with her clients. She also meets regularly with a journalist who is apparently writing an article about her. This is funny, because as either Christine or Chelsea, the prostitute alter ego, this woman doesn't say a single interesting thing throughout the entire movie. The only interesting characters are the "clients", and yet they're paying Chelsea for her time, not just for sex.

It is tempting to critique Sasha Grey's performance, but the script doesn't give her much to do right, let alone wrong. It's a one note character, and a one note performance.

"The Girlfriend Experience" also refrains from making any kind of statement about this strange, shocking situation that so many students are in now. It's just Chelsea visiting different men.

It has occurred to me that the repetition of these scenes makes it deliberately confusing as to who the men are. At first, you assume they are all clients Chelsea is servicing. Then, you realise that Chelsea is Christine with some, one is a boyfriend, the other is a journalist interviewing her. Is the point that for someone in Christine's situation, men are interchangeable, and it is hard to tell clients from spouses? This is not the way any of the real-life sex workers I have heard from describe their work and private lives, but hey, I'll take meaning where I can get it.

A brilliant little film, economic in its resources and smart in its complex editing. However, this is not destined to be a box office hit. It is the kind of film that Soderbergh does once in a while in-between pop flicks to avoid getting bored.

Sasha Grey delivers some good acting as an ambiguously shallow and ambitious prostitute who tries to survive the post-Obama post-Crisis world of depressed clients and worried boyfriend. Her relationship with her costumers and other professionals who are part of the escort world is built little by little in several out-of-order scenes. Most people will find the movie's timeline confusing, but all you have to do is pay attention to her wardrobe and everything will be fine.

I must also note the soundtrack, that makes use of very interesting unknown music. I specially liked the street drummer.

The images are beautiful enough to make one think "well, not bad for a movie shot on digital". Besides the old-school narrative (in the sense that it belongs more to the Bergman era than to the "Wolverine III" era) this movie looks and feels like the new kind of cinema that cheap digital shooting offers. And I like the way it feels.

IN A NUTSHELL: For Sasha Grey and Soderbergh fans and people who actually care about cinema language. If you like Soderbergh because of "Ocean's Eleven", stay away.

New York City glamour, extremely real acting and scenarios followed by CNN circa 2008 mumbo-jumbo, annoyingly flashy cinematography, and wanna-be American Psycho depravity-in-materialism preaching. Rarely do it want to shut off a movie every five minutes, and if so, even more rarely do I find something to respect in the next five.

As to Sasha Grey and her acting abilities, I think she's OK at it. Many reviews scathe her for "deadpan", but I think that's what high-class dumb sluts actually are probably like. Pretty much empty. Making the most of what god gave them in a depraved way. To me it seems real. The "hooker's boyfriend" character was great, which is hard to pull off in my mind. I really empathized with this guy in a weird situation.

What's not real are the characters of many, though not all, of the "rich assholes". That's about as eloquent as Soderberg is with these characters, "They're just rich assholes" when "the rest of us are hurting" as we are reminded again, and again, and again.

The script and plot line isn't great, often forced by some contrived circumstance, and really goes nowhere in the end. Maybe 5 is too generous. I guess I was intrigued.