If there’s one lesson I learned from watching Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, it’s this: if you’re an aspiring call girl, never sleep with a blogger — much less a blogger who reviews escorts under the name “The Erotic Connoisseur” and who tries to sell you on his scheme to fly a planeful of beautiful girls on a “junket” to Dubai by saying, “The great thing about the whole project is that it sounds like it’s a white slavery ring — but it’s not!”Not being an erotic connoisseur, until reading about this film, I had never heard of Sasha Grey, the porn star Soderbergh has cast in The Girlfriend Experience’s lead role, an upwardly mobile prostitute named Chelsea (or sometimes Christine). Lithe, dark-haired, small-breasted, with luxuriant thick eyebrows and a wry, inscrutable cast to her face, there’s little about her that resembles the vapid sex-doll image of the stereotypical XXX star. Apparently, she’s a big fan of Jean-Luc Godard and once even considered adopting “Anna Karina” as her screen name, after the star of several of Godard’s best movies. She appears to have been cast in The Girlfriend Experience partly for the frisson that her porn career brings to a film whose talk-to-sex ratio is approximately 70:1, and partly for the flat, porn-trained line readings that she brings to the script.
It’s hard to tell, actually, the extent to which Grey’s lack of affect is a deliberate choice on her part, or a calculated effect on Soderbergh’s. Certainly in the film’s first few minutes, as we see snippets of Chelsea on a date with one of her many clients, she seems to barely have a personality at all. She’s not a bimbo, but her banal observations about movies and politics don’t exactly suggest there’s a vivacious sophisticate underneath all those designer clothes.
But is that blank performance part of the point? Chelsea tells a journalist interviewing her for some kind of magazine profile that her job trains her to keep her true self hidden away — if her clients really wanted to go out with the “real me,” she notes, they wouldn’t be paying her. Is Chelsea just one more commodity in this world of expensive hotel rooms and private jets? Nearly every scene in The Girlfriend Experience is some kind of negotiation or financial exchange — it’s set against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential election, and Chelsea’s clients are much more interested in talking about the economy than in sex.
Complicating matters is the fact that Grey’s performance is no flatter than any of her co-stars (save for Glenn Kenny, a film critic making his acting debut, who in his one scene makes The Erotic Connoisseur a sleazeball for the ages). The only other significant character is Chelsea’s boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos), a handsome personal trainer who seems to tolerate her unusual occupation — that is, until she capriciously breaks the rules of their relationship by agreeing to spend a weekend with one of her clients. Soderbergh, working from a script by Rounders/Ocean’s Thirteen screenwriters David Levien and Brian Koppelman, doesn’t provide many clues as to how Chris managed to sneak his way into Chelsea’s well-guarded heart, or what compromises he needed to make with himself to stay in love with her. As in Che, Soderbergh is content to stay in the present, to point his camera at his characters and let the audience come to their own conclusions about what’s going on in their mind.
The approach works better here than in Che, I think, if only because the characters are shallower and their behaviour easier to diagnose. It’s also one of Soderbergh’s handsomest-looking movies; as usual, he’s working as his own DP under the name “Peter Andrews,” and his lens expertly captures the seductive but ultimately cold luxury of Chelsea’s world — every frame of The Girlfriend Experience looks like it could be an ad for very expensive watches or sunglasses, the kind where the models look so sleek and gorgeous that touching them would be as scary as sticking your hand into an X-ray beam.
But you get the feeling that not even the most powerful X-ray machine ever invented could see inside Chelsea. Who is this woman? Does she see herself still having sex for money five years from now? Does she hate herself, or does she take professional pride in her ability to make her clients come just by embracing them? And, most importantly, does she plan on voting for McCain or Obama? I’m not sure even Soderbergh knows for sure.
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