Published on Cinescene.


SASHA GRAY DOES LUNCH IN THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE

Love for sale in DV

The Girlfriend Experience, another one of Steven Soderbergh's forays into low-budget DV filmmaking, is a cold and soulless movie about a cold and soulless young woman. Chelsea, played by porn star Sasha Gray, looks quite a lot like Tiny, the girl in Mary Ellen Mark's famous 1983 photo portrait: the same impeccable clothes and sad little turned down mouth. The only suspense is watching to see if she'll give away an emotion. Even a small one.

From first to last Girlfriend gleams with darkly elegant digital images of good Manhattan restaurants, chic hotels, and other places where big money is to be spent with cold returns: an upstate resort, a chartered plane, Vegas. Chelsea (Gray), a fancy Manhattan hooker, lives with a surprisingly possessive gym bunny called Chris (Chris Santos).

Both Chris and Chelsea seek betterment. Chelsea meets with website designers, a journalist, a business adviser, an older colleague, always looking for ways to "move to the next level." Chris does some side research into the gym business and presses his boss at the club where he's a personal trainer to give him more of a management position. The trouble is this is late 2008, just before the election, when everybody's scared of losing his shirt. Call girls and physical trainers are just the kind of luxuries people are cutting back on. Don't expect to see sex in this movie, still less love, though like every girl Chelsea is looking for a meaningful relationship, even if she is looking in all the wrong places. When a married john makes her laugh, she's ready to run off for a weekend with him (against Chris's strict rules) and maybe drop Chris altogether.

Soderbergh has sliced and diced and rearranged sequences out of chronological order, which somehow adds to both the glamor and the lack of affect of the proceedings. Moments in Chris and Chelsea's modern bar-kitchen-living room alternate with blurry shots of Chris's trip to Vegas as an escort (he too), meetings and goodbyes of Chelsea with johns, conversations in good restaurants, two of which, Blue Hill, and Nobu, get named, as do various upscale clothing designers. For a while we get voice-overs of Chelsea's diary, recording tricks, what she wore, and how she was received. For repeaters, she remembers to ask about family.

Chelsea catches hell from Chris for planning that weekend, but when she goes to the resort, the john has gotten guilty about his wife and kids and bailed out. Poshness alternates with sleazy pathos. The most pleasurable moments come in contemplating the effect of amber filters on plate glass and watching big solid forks waved over elegant chinaware.

There are vivid moments, but no crescendos. Online film reviewer Glenn Kenny is momentarily disgusting as a "critic" of call girls who pitches a group gig in Dubai and cadges a freebie. Chris Santos' evident discomfort with every line he speaks makes your flesh creep, but so does most of the movie. An Orthodox diamond merchant who collapses into sighs and tears in a hug provides yet another kind of embarrassment. The suspense over whether Chelsea will crack evaporates eventually. She just doesn't. This does not mean she's uninteresting to watch. She makes your flesh creep too, and her emotional absence is a kind of presence. Subconsciously one feels a puzzlement: how can anyone be so uptight and still breathe?

Soderbergh's technically and financially similar 2005 film Bubble was about naive low income people and a murder. With its quaint doll factory milieu and drab everyday people set off by a serious crime, Bubble had a sense of guilelessness and authenticity that's quite the reverse of Chelsea's world. A vérité style of filmmaking has a considerably weaker effect when everyone is guarded and supercilious.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.