Its subject isn’t erotica, it’s commodities trading. His movie, stylishly shot on the high-def cheap, runs 77 potently sexless minutes.
Grey, 21, is there, all right, but director Steven Soderbergh, 46, has no interest in servicing the panting john in us. Though many individual scenes are sharply observed, it amounts to the same observation over and over: Chelsea, Chris, and all their clients are whores, trapped in a transactional economy that isolates and dehumanizes even their most intimate encounters.Looking for the dirty thrill of ogling a real porn star, Sasha Grey, as she plays a high-priced Manhattan hooker doing a suck-fuck Kama Sutra? Then, dear God, steer clear of The Girlfriend Experience. (In a sly joke on Soderbergh’s part, this sleazebag is played, superbly, by movie critic Glenn Kenny.) Periodically, Soderbergh cuts to a scene of Chris aboard a private jet to Vegas on a junket financed by some wealthy clients. A porn-site webmaster convinces her to sleep with him in exchange for free publicity, then posts a snidely negative “review” of her sexual performance.
A reporter (played by journalist Mark Jacobson) tries unsuccessfully to get past Chelsea’s mask of composure. Otherwise, its structure is episodic and loosely achronological. The outcome of that plotline-will Chelsea go through with the trip? Will she lose Chris if she does?-is the closest the movie comes to suspense. Fans of Sasha Grey’s oeuvre will be disappointed to learn that this unrated movie contains no sex at all-the most we get is a seconds-long glimpse of Grey’s (refreshingly unaugmented) nude body.Ĭhelsea’s live-in boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), is a personal trainer who’s fine with his girlfriend’s highly lucrative profession until she decides to go away for the weekend with a client she’s started to care about.
Chelsea logs each transaction in her computer diary in between meetings, detailing her designer outfits in an affectless voice-over: “I wore a Michael Kors dress and shoes and La Perla lingerie underneath.” Her job is to provide her clients not just with sex but with the full-service “girlfriend experience”: They take in movies, drink wine, have (stilted) conversations, and share breakfast before she hops in a limo and heads to her next meeting. Grey isn’t exactly an actress, but her aura of impenetrable blankness makes her a curiously entrancing protagonist. Despite its meager production values, The Girlfriend Experience looks sleek and appealing it takes place in the same copper-toned cocoon of poshness that envelops the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, as Grey’s character, $2,000-an-hour call girl Chelsea, flits in and out of four-star restaurants and designer boutiques in Manhattan.
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