A drama set in the days leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, and centered on a high-end Manhattan call girl meeting the challenges of her boyfriend, her clients, and her work.A drama set in the days leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, and centered on a high-end Manhattan call girl meeting the challenges of her boyfriend, her clients, and her work.A drama set in the days leading up to the 2008 Presidential election, and centered on a high-end Manhattan call girl meeting the challenges of her boyfriend, her clients, and her work.
- Awards
- 2 nominations
- Waiter
- (as T. Colby Trane)
- Director
- Writers
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- Trivia"Girlfriend experience" is a form of sex work (paid-for female companionship) in which a female prostitute behaves like a male client's girlfriend or shows (artificial) emotional intimacy beyond the sex act.
- Quotes
Chelsea: [voice-over] I met with Phillipe on October 5th and 6th. I wore a Michael Kors dress and shoes with La Perla lingerie underneath, and diamond stud earrings. We met at 7:30 PM at the hotel, and had a drink downstairs. He liked my dress but didn't go into detail why, and didn't mention anything else about my appearance. We ate dinner at Blue Hill. Phillipe didn't ask for a menu and had the chef serve us a five-course meal, a different wine with each course. We went to the 9:40 PM showing of 'Man on Wire' at the Sunshine Cinema, and he liked the movie. We went back to the hotel and talked for half an hour. Mostly about a friend of his that keeps borrowing money from him and not paying it back. Then we had sex for about an hour. After that, we talked for about 15 minutes and he fell asleep. At breakfast, he briefly told me his worries regarding the economy, and he said I should invest my money in gold. He also mentioned a book about how the Federal Reserve works. He didn't make another appointment.
- Crazy creditsAfter the end credits, there's a brief scene of Chelsea washing a client's hair as he sits in a bathtub and talks about John McCain.
- ConnectionsFeatured in 2010 AVN Awards Show (2010)
- SoundtracksBad Timing
Written and Produced by David Holmes
Courtesy of Universal Songs of Polygram International Inc.
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.
- bob the moo
- Oct 18, 2009
- Permalink
Details
Box office
- Budget
- $1,700,000 (estimated)
- Gross US & Canada
- $695,840
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $162,965
- May 24, 2009
- Gross worldwide
- $1,060,941
- Runtime1 hour 17 minutes
- Color
- Sound mix
- Aspect ratio
- 2.39 : 1