Steven Soderbergh has never been an easy guy to pin. His debut feature, Sex, Lies and Videotape exploded all over the world on release 1989 and it remains one of the seminal films in recent independent cinema, paving the way for a new band of film makers in the early nineties, single handedly put the then unheard of Miramax in the spotlight and hijacked the way vital low budget cinema was being produced and marketed.
Veering every which way since, Soderbergh has turned his hand to remakes, crime novels, indulgent exercises in style, massive 4 hour biopics and dabbled in ground-breaking ways to shoot and release cinema. Little change in the pattern of chaos here then as the workaholic releases his 19th feature film in as many years and once again takes a screaming u-turn.
Beautifully shot for 1.3 million dollars on his new beloved RED digital camera, Soderbergh strangely decided to call in hardcore adult film star Sasha Grey for the lead role. She plays Chelsea, a beautiful high class call girl with an understanding boyfriend, Chris, and a hourly rate of $2000. Not too bad considering the western world is broken, in debt and beginning it’s biggest recession in 100 years. At least her high rolling clients finally have something other than sex to talk about as they are stripping down in their penthouse apartments. The “flip” comes when a restless Chelsea begins to question leaving Chris in favor of a married client.
The Obama/McCain election plays out in the background of a film that attempts to dissect just what it is that makes sex such a strangely different commodity to stocks, shares, seats in parliament, money or a “normal job”. Soderbergh’s always fluid editing is a joy, each scene’s dialogue often playing over the next, every shot beautifully composed with its actors often playing out of focus, lost in the frame or behind the clinical rooms and bars where the bare “plot” unfolds.
Grey, obviously somewhat accustomed to what most people would consider to be an abnormal career, uses it to her advantage and exudes a strange and intense detachment throughout the films purposely halting and often uncomfortable, unscripted sounding dialogue. Chris Santos, as Chelsea’s boyfriend excellently plays a subtle go getting counterpoint to Chelsea’s near nonchalance of life.
It would seem that Chelsea’s paying clients in the film all represent different aspects of life’s good, bad and ugly. They are a varied bunch. The press, the banks, the regular guy and, in the films only nearly funny moment, even a critic, because after all, we’re all one of them. Of course Mr. Soderbergh has had a few of his own… and so, in this, one of his often slated “between blockbuster experiments” its hard to believe it’s not an intentional jibe at his most vicious detractors.
Perhaps the real drama does comes too little too late in the piece to have a powerful impact, but it’s lack of surface emotion (and of sex for that matter) in a way makes the film far more delicate and sad. Although a far cry from the brilliant Sex, Lies and Videotape, The Girlfriend Experience has a unique lingering quality to it and for all it’s coolly composed interiors and its minimal soundtrack there really is something quite human beneath it all.
The Girlfriend Experience is due for a UK release next month.
