The Girlfriend Experience (2009, Soderbergh)

"How the fuck are ya... like what I haven't done with the place?" -Internet Blogger, The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

Sasha Grey is one of porn's hottest rising starlets: extremely young, aggressive, and hyper sexual, there's seemingly nothing she won't do and enjoy. Following in the footsteps of recent gonzo marquee names like Bella Donna and Flower Tucci, she combines their zest for sexuality and sexual acts, enjoyment of sexual boundary-pushing, and a celebration of and revelling in all things sexual; with filmic and literary knowledge, artistic aspirations, and multi-media ambition. Paired with filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, a director who has always played with and against his mainstream success as much as he's embraced it, there are the makings here for at least one cinematic masterpiece.

While Grey is attractive, alluring, and a sexual compulsive, there's also something very detached about her. Not necessarily as a porn starlet uncomfortable with her chosen profession, but as someone whose intelligence far exceeds her purely sexual exploits; watching her films you can sense that as much as she's enjoying fully submitting to her carnal appetites and riding a wave of pure bestial nature; there's also a part of her watching herself from the outside, wondering where she can take things next, what it all means, and what the next step is in that evolution. There's something of the Marquis de Sade to Grey, a sexual carnivore lurking behind the youthful idealism and yes, even innocence, that are still somehow present in her persona. In this digital age, we've reached a place where such a cocktail of personality traits can somehow co-exist; young women can be this sexually empowered, materially savvy, and still ultimately naive. All of which is to say there is a wealth of material present in everything from our current society's sexual morals, technology, and Grey herself to provide a truly insightful and studied look at our culture and where our sexuality is headed.

But while Soderbergh starts with all of the necessary ingredients, he never combines them into anything worth a damn. Grey plays high-class escort Chelsea, balancing clients, finances, marketing strategies, and a struggle for some kind of protected, personal life and even intimacy. But Soderbergh populates the film with such on-the-nose economic discussions between financial investment ex-fratboys, and overly obvious financial observations and advice from poorly-portrayed wealthy clients, that the end result never really scrapes below the surface. We get it: the world is in a tough economic place right now, and Chelsea, like every one else, is feeling the burn, and is intelligent enough to be financially aware and ask questions about her own financial planning. But these economic discoveries need to be the starting point of a journey; they need to be the window-dressing setting the tone, skewing things slightly off-center and interesting the viewer enough to follow this character and her plight-- not be the central theme or final summation of some half-baked thesis. "Hooker with a heart of gold" is not a story-- it's a character description, and a stereotypical one at that. As is "financially-aware and somewhat emotionally vulnerable high class escort." This should be the beginning set-up for the "and then what?" that drives an actual plot or character study.

But evidently the end result is that we're supposed to marvel that the girl has these kinds of smarts; and we're supposed to see some kind of emotional struggle with intimacy and relationships resulting from her flirtation with a potential client and her whimsical thoughts about leaving her boyfriend. The latter fails because Grey, as fascinating a person as she is, just doesn't have the acting chops to pull off anything in the film beyond naturalism. The moment she's required to pull out some emotion while remaining believable, things quickly detour to the kind of whiny, embarrassed acting that populates beginning acting classes. Yet the failure of the film isn't entirely, or even primarily, her fault. Soderbergh, being the skilled and experienced director that he is, should have been more than capable of directing this non-actor through scenarios and story lines capitalizing on her numerous talents and naturally-present behavior and emotions. We don't need to see some Streepian range of emotion from her; we just need to see the sides of her that anyone who's familiar with her already knows exist, and have those sides explored through well-choreographed story points.

The truly intimate moments between Chelsea and her personal trainer boyfriend Chris, while present, are few and far between. Their mundaneness would have been a legitimate choice, if paired with a deeper exploration into Chelsea's character and her desires. But that doesn't seem to be what Soderbergh is aiming for anyway, nor does a sparseness of intimacy. Rather, the problem seems to lie with Soderbergh's overweighting both Chris and Chelsea's business savvy, and the constant strategizing and marketing considerations of their not dissimilar businesses. What little screen time remains is spent exploring Chelsea's compulsive pseudo-spirituality culled from half-understood numerology books. It would seem Soderbergh is ultimately trying to paint a portrait of someone lost in a world of constantly increasing technology, managing to keep pace professionally while floundering personally.

Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Soderbergh is too determined not to find fault with Chelsea and her chosen profession, is too determined to champion it as a legitimate choice and then use her as a craftily-cast sort of everywoman for our times; and ultimately, wants too much to buddy up to his leading lady. In order for this sort of take to have worked, a deeper exploration into the more vulnerable and human side of Chelsea would have been required-- more innocence, more confusion, more of both the failed and successful attempts at controlling her career. What we're instead offered in its place, from the compulsive and misunderstood numerology to the awkwardly forced emotions and whiny, bratty, illogical, and annoying argumentativeness, simply reduces the character to an embarrassing joke. We get neither a biting social critique nor a profound exploration into the human condition in the vein of Grey's beloved French New Wave auteurs, who were also so influential towards shaping Soderbergh's own work, but instead exactly the kind of limp, impotent, and lazy effort that usually requires either a little blue pill or an extremely motivated fluffer.

So what begins as a somewhat experimental possible exploration into contemporary sexuality and personality ends as nothing more than a failed experiment, with nothing to say beyond the obvious and cursory. Grey's persona will undoubtedly remain unscathed by the endeavor, because there's really no down side to the project for her, even as a failure. Yet it's a shame that somewhere in this bundle of film lies a lost Godardian classic, and a missed opportunity for her to create exactly the kind of art she's always aimed for. As for Soderbergh, I'm still grateful that he's willing to try things like this, and take his artistic lumps like a man, rather than simply phoning in the pre-packaged Hollywood product like so many purely mainstream directors.

5/10