The Girlfriend Experience

(2009)

Directed by

Steven Soderbergh

Review by Zach Saltz

Many critics have scrutinized Stephen Soderbergh’s decision to cast a porn actress as the lead in his latest film, The Girlfriend Experience.  While working in the adult entertainment industry would certainly give an actress familiarity with the occupation of the film’s main character, Chelsea (she’s a high-priced escort model), the performance by 21-year-old Sasha Gray (some 160 pornographic titles to her name) is hardly limited to a nice body and a sensuous demeanor.  It’s a serious, multi-dimensional performance that is complex in the way that the character is forced to put on a deep façade with her clients, and never remove it for fear of vulnerability and rejection.

Chelsea works in an elite circle of Manhattan investors and corporate kings who hire her out not only for sexual encounters, but for the simulated experience of having a girlfriend.  Many of these men talk about their hectic lives in business circles; some of them are so absorbed with Wall Street life that they pass on sex for the opportunity to tell someone, anyone about the dour state of the economy and their businesses (the film is set in October 2008, in the middle of the economic freefall).  They frequently talk about their wives and families, so much so that Chelsea knows their names and asks how they are doing.  Some of the men in turn want to know about her personal life, and how “real” the girlfriend guise truly is.  Of course, the girlfriend label, more often than not, leads to sex.  But for the men asking for Chelsea’s services, with her debonair sophistication and meticulous high-end fashion, it is far more than squarely about the sex – it is about having a beautiful woman listen and care for them, or at least give off that impression.

One unique aspect of Chelsea’s life is her long-term relationship with Chris (Chris Santos), a personal trainer.  Chelsea’s clients are more curious about this fact than upset; one of them, a magazine writer played by real-life journalist Marc Jacobsen, actually expresses a desire to meet Chris.  The film’s first half establishes the parallel nature of their jobs – they are ostensibly employed for their physical attributes, but are really valued by clients because of the image and persona they exemplify and constantly refine, through trips to the weight room and Gucci, respectively.  They both desperately seek to escape the conformity of other gym employees and prostitutes by obsessively striving to be the best in their fields; this puts an obvious strain on their relationship, and there are more scenes of them apart in The Girlfriend Experience than there are of them together. 

Of course, how can a committed relationship survive the damage caused by the routine sexual escapades of one of its members?  The answer, of course, is that it cannot, and even the “foolproof” system set up by Chris and Chelsea invariably fails when she returns home late one evening after a session of which Chris is not informed.  It is soon revealed that Chelsea has shed her emotional mask for a brief reckless moment and that leads her to defenseless susceptibility.  Her impulse may not be commendable, but the fleeting feeling of possible liberation from alienation is universal, and it is in these scenes when Gray is at her heartbreaking best.

The Girlfriend Experience works because Soderbergh is too smart a director to merely make the film into a “message” picture, exploring the dangers and downfalls of being a call girl.  Like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (a similarly small-scale film by a big-name director who has never completely abandoned his indie roots), we as viewers are caught up in a coolly distant voyeuristic gaze into the lives of people who are steered straight toward disaster.  We empathize them not because we have personal experiences with escort services per se, but because the needs and longings of the helpless male clients for a sympathetic ear and Chelsea herself for personal reconciliation never ring false, even in Soderbergh’s frigid objective lens.  In the end, Chelsea is burned; her relationship with Chris is shattered, and her reputation is smeared by a particularly cruel internet writer.  And yet, as the film ends, we sense that these events are all just part of the average week of an emotionally volatile and wildly unstable girlfriend trying her best to attend to business before pleasure.

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