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DVD Review- The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
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Sasha Grey knows how to provide The Girlfriend Experience.
The world of cinema is lucky to have in it a director like Steven Soderbergh. His filmography is quite varied and runs the gamut from high costing blockbusters to micro-budgeted experimental pieces. He's directed bonanzas brimming with big-named stars (Ocean's Eleven and its two sequels), Oscar winning material (Erin Brockovich, Traffic), and quirky independent features (The Limey, Bubble, which featured an entire cast of non-professional actors). Now Soderbergh has unleashed The Girlfriend Experience, a film which takes its name from a type of service expensive prostitutes offer wherin they act like a girlfriend to the client, offering a more personal and less limited experience.
Like Bubble, the majority of the cast of The Girlfriend Experience are not professional actors, which, surprisingly, is not noticeable and does not limit the film in any way. The one exception is Sasha Grey, who is not a traditional actress, but a well known pornographic starlet. She plays Christine, who under the alias of Chelsea is a sophisticated, high-priced escort. She runs her business herself (there is no pimp to speak of), promoting herself through a website and performing thorough background checks on potential clients. She is beautiful and demure, not the type of individual one might assume is a call girl. She even has a live-in boyfriend, Chris, a handsome man who works as a professional trainer. Chris is completely aware of Christine's occupation.
As this movie veers towards the experimental, the story unfolds in a non-linear fashion. Scenes play out of sequence right from the start, a method of filmmaking that is jarring and a bit confusing at first, but if you stick around until the end it all makes sense. Through the course of The Girlfriend Experience we see Christine/Chelsea on many "dates" with various successful businessmen. When asked about dealing with her customers, Christine bluntly states, "You really have to adapt and become something that they want." There is much talk of the dwindling economy and the upcoming election (the events of the film take place in October of 2008). We witness Christine taking steps to improve her business by seeking to increase her hits on website search engines and meeting with a strange man who runs a prostitute reviewing website called The Erotic Connoisseur; concurrently, we watch as Chris tries to gain more pay and responsibilities at his job. We also get to see Christine interviewed by a journalist who wants to know who she really is and how someone in her profession can possibly maintain a successful relationship.
While The Girlfriend Experience is a movie about somebody who gets paid to have sex, this is not a cheap and tawdry sex movie. There are no graphic sex scenes, though there is more nudity than in most mainstream films. Below the surface what The Girlfriend Experience is really about is what people really want or desire in life. Christine/Chelsea's customers want to believe the illusion that, albeit for a finite amount of time, she really is their girlfriend. These clients don't just throw her down and use her physically. They take her on dates to dinner and the movies. They talk about their problems and their lives. Some don't even have sex with her at all. It's also about what Christine wants. She has a strong interest in personology, the belief that studying a person's facial features and physical attributes can predict their behavior and character traits, a belief that causes quite a bit of chaos in her life. There's also the issue as to what Chris wants, which becomes apparent towards the end of the film.
The Girlfriend Experience is definitely a worthwhile experience for the right type of audience. The film is similar in structure to Soderbergh's best movie, The Limey, which also toyed with the linear aspects of storytelling. If you didn't know the cast was made up of amateurs, you'd never notice, all of the performances are well acted. Sasha Grey makes the jump from adult films to more mainstream fare confidently and surely, hopefully she'll make more movies of this type. Also notable is the distributor of The Girlfriend Experience, Magnolia Pictures. For the last five years Magnolia Pictures has been distributing independent and foreign films and may be the next Miramax. To date they've released such excellent films as Let the Right One In, Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior, Timecrimes, and Jesus Camp. The Girlfriend Experience is highly recommended to mature fans of experimental and independent films. Those expecting something of a more pornographic nature should skip this one.
DVD extras include a commentary with Steven Soderbergh and Sasha Grey, an alternate cut of the film, and the short featurette "HDNet: A Look at The Girlfriend Experience." Also available on Blu-Ray.
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Rent it from Netflix: The Girlfriend Experience
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