The Girlfriend Experience

“A great civilization is not destroyed from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

“Once a civilization can justify paying thousands of dollars for pussy, that civilization has become a pussy itself.”

Steve Soderbergh is no stranger to whoring. He’s whored himself for years to finance his lifestyle of independent filmmaking. He even caught a bad case of George Clooney from the Coen Brothers and spread it around even worse so that he could finance various projects such as five hours worth of Che Guevara’s life designed to dissatisfy most audiences, and this project as well, which is ironically about whoring.

Sasha Baron Grey plays Christine Brown, a character also portrayed this summer by Allison Lohman in Drag Me To Hell. This film puts the Christine Brown character in a much less supernatural situation and I think Grey does a good job playing her. Christine is an escort who mostly listens to rich men weep about the economy (this film is set during the 2008 economic crisis). We’ve all encountered people who cry after sex, but I guess when you pay you get to cry beforehand. Christine doesn’t say much, and I mean, if somebody who pays thousands of dollars per hour for your company is weeping in front of you about how the economy is fucked I would probably try to be inconspicuous too. Probably duck behind a corporate jet or something.

The film employs various narrative gimmicks to push this film to the brink of faux documentary, but not over the edge. You get Christine reading aloud from her diary, which is simply a journal of facts such as days she wore certain dresses and lists of activities with no personal reflection. You also get a portion where Christine is getting interviewed by a journalist, but he stays in the shot. You also get the occasional shakeycam handleheld shot. But it never tries to make you think the characters are aware of the camera crew and that this is a documentary. But shit, it came close.

The film doesn’t quite have the jazz rhythm of its own electrifying trailer. It doesn’t always move along and for a mood piece, it’s not always creating a mood. But it does have a certain Agnes Varda quality in making pure voyeurism of mundane daily activities oddly fascinating, but it doesn’t quite connect enough dots to make the leap into Sofia Coppola or David Gordon Green territory.

The film does everything in its power to make the main character enigmatic. The way everybody obsesses over wanting to know what the “real” her is like, and the way her responses to direct questions about her identity and motivations are evasively vague.

The film also seems to be daring you to call it tedious. But I can’t say I ever found it to be so. It’s definitely dry, but I found all the scenes kinda interesting. I really couldn’t help but be fascinated by the non-sex things people would choose to do with an escort. I mean, maybe it’s some kind of fetish or something, but who pays a beautiful hooker thousands of dollars just to take her to a movie or to tell her to vote for John McCain?

And every time I thought I had some sort of observation about this film it would head me off at the pass and directly say it. Just as I was starting to think that Christine is more like a therapist than a hooker, one of her clients says so. Just as I was thinking that this movie is about how everybody puts on a mask for their job, the film comes right out and says this. It’s like it was reading my mind, and as it turns out my mind is kind of a vague riff on economics through the eyes of a hooker.

The weirdest part is when I got home from seeing this film and realized that the lead character was kinda like an allegory for the film itself. The film was kinda blank and I could sit there and read anything I wanted into it, just like Christine would sit there and stare blankly at men who would just say whatever they wanted to her. Even more accurately, I got home and felt that I had paid for an empty experience, yet would watch it again. So this movie is like a snake that eats its own tail or a hooker who pays herself to just be her real self around herself and is also her own pimp or something.

The closing scene is almost worth the price of admission alone for what-the-fuck factor in terms of most random ways to end a movie. If its meant to deliver a message, I think that message is that everybody needs a hug sometimes and that some people need hugs that border on clothed humping and that (spoiler) Israel needs a hug from John McCain.

I think.

If you read interesting things into this shit, try this other shit:

My Blueberry Nights

I talk about a corny jazz romance movie I rented.

Showgirls

Paul Verhoeven goes all about Eve!

Skunk Farm Skanks

Here’s my take on a Straw Dogs type of movie.

The title was inspired by Bad News Bears.