The Girlfriend Experience
The Girlfriend Experience is a 2009 American slice-of-life drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, and starring Sasha Grey. It was shot in New York City, and a rough cut was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. The film was also made available on Amazon Video on Demand as a pre-theatrical rental.
Soderbergh mentioned Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers as influences. The film was produced for $1.3 million and was shot with a relatively inexpensive Red One camera.
Plot
In the days leading up to the 2008 presidential election, a high-end Manhattan escort meets the challenges of her real life relationships, her clients, and her work. Chelsea specializes in offering girlfriend experiences. She finds that lately her clients are spending less and less on her services, and are troubled by the Great Recession, a topic they raise frequently in her company. She is also interviewed by a journalist, who quizzes her about her work and personal life. She goes from client to client performing her services. The film contrasts Chelsea's experience with her clients with her boyfriend Chris, a personal trainer at a costly gym who spends his time talking up to his wealthier male clients.A married screenwriter appears as a potential new client for Chelsea and proposes that she go away with him for the weekend. Initially intending to reject him, Chelsea starts to feel drawn to him because their birthdays coincide together well, as she is an avid reader of "personology" books and thinks their connection shouldn't be something to miss. This creates a fight with Chris, who berates her over her eagerness to meet with the man, as "going away" with clients is a boundary in their relationship. Chris is invited by one of his clients to join him and other finance men on a trip to Las Vegas. While he struggles to leverage a better position in his current gym and others, Chelsea also feels the stress of the job, especially with the coming of a new girl that her own clients start to favor.
Cast
- Sasha Grey as Christine, alias Chelsea
- Chris Santos as Chris
- Emma Lahana as Adrian
- Philip Eytan as Philip
- Timothy Davis as Tim
- Peter Zizzo as Zizzo
- Glenn Kenny as "The Erotic Connoisseur"
- Vincent Dellacera as Chelsea's Driver
- Kimberly Magness as Happy Hour
- Mark Jacobson as Interviewer
- Kenneth Myers as Craft Steak Maître d’
- Michael Sugar as “Sugar”
- Daniel Algrant as Dan
Reception
Roger Ebert rated the film four out of four stars, saying "This film is true about human nature. It clearly sees needs and desires. It is not universal, but within its particular focus, it is unrelenting."
On the opposite end of the spectrum, David Edelstein of New York Magazine complained that "most of the dialogue is listless, and no matter how much Soderbergh snips and stitches, the movie is a corpse with twitching limbs." Luke Davies, critic for The Monthly, wrote that the film is "disposable and pretentious" and "is shot sombrely and austerely, in a style that might be described as 'vacuous chic'" and concluded that "as a film in which a porn star's presence is a fundamental marketing hook, it is masturbation."