The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

When Rosa Von Praunheim wanted to make a film about Fassbinder's "widows", he just took a camera and went from apartment to apartment, from restaurant to restaurant and filmed what came in front of his camera. The end-product he called a "near-reality" movie. When German journalist Günther Wallraff wanted to document discrimination and racism in German plants, he masked himself as a Turk and worked with hidden cameras. The US-university professor Barbara Ehrenreich did the same some years ago when she wanted to collect material for a study about the working-poor in America.

I wonder why Soderbergh did not the same and just followed a real call-girl through a representative couple of days, thereby illustrating the different aspects of her work. Pseudo-documentaries are almost worthless because the border between fiction and reality is too close, and still in this closeness there is the biggest lie which every audience senses deeply. Instead of that he spent 2 millions of dollars which he filmed through in only a couple of days. Did he pay the 2'000 dollars which Sasha Gray probably gets in reality? It would be a fruitful experiment to calculate the minutes together during which she is shown in the 77 minutes movie.

Unfortunately, the movie is neither a stylized product of genre-crossing nor can it be taken for experimental work - it is mostly comparable with that TV series that the late Ede Zimmermann invented in the Germany of the late 50ies - where actual criminal deeds were played by actors and broadcast on TV in the hope that someone would be a witness of the real crime. Here, the imitation fulfilled practical purposes, but in "The Girlfriend Experience? - What is it then, that Soderbergh wanted to show? That even "love" and not only sex can be bought? - But oh no, he is already a while on this world, isn't he?

Fmovies: This film gets a 5/10 from me because mostly it was in focus and not too hostile to the viewer.

That said, let me start at the end, and say that I was at once relieved that the tedium was over, and annoyed that almost no story had been told, no character really developed. It doesn't even qualify as an abstractly artistic experience.

Soderbergh is by no means my favourite director, but he has been responsible for some at least competent film-making in the past, which is why I went to see this film, in addition to the subject sounding interesting.

But I am just shocked not to be able to find anything good to recommend this film except that it's in focus, and you can identify a main character or two. The sound, cinematography, and editing are otherwise among the worst I've ever experienced. The story just barely exists. In a way, the film is worth seeing just to see how not to make a film.

I could go on about what I wish had been different, but really, what's the point? It's beyond repair.

I will say it's better than Last Days by Gus Van Sant. If you liked that, you'll probably love this.

Although his aesthetic isn't quite as detached or suffused in jagged poetry, I wonder if Steven Soderbergh may have been, if subconsciously, channeling Jean-Luc Godard with his latest film The Girlfriend Experience, specifically a film like Godard's My Life to Live. There Godard dealt with a woman who has little money and so becomes a prostitute, seen in chapter segments and with a style that had a basis in a script but also in documentary intuition- meaning the actors could do what they wanted, even if the director had to stay true to some kind of form. With The Girlfriend Experience we get Soderbergh again working in his "minor" work form, under the radar of the box-office (Oceans') and controversy (Che). He casts a young porn actress (Sasha Grey) and non-professionals (the actor playing Chris, the personal trainer and boyfriend of Grey's character, is an actual personal trainer), and the film's non-scripted-but-scripted style, and editing taking cues from the Nouvelle Vague, is at the least never less than interesting.

If the film doesn't tell a story exactly, which will surely frustrate some but not be a surprise to anyone who saw Schizopolis or Full Frontal (for better and worse), it does convey time and place very well, of a city where the upper class on edge from horrid economy and we're told of the "companionship" of the call girl played by Grey like in journal entries or sound bytes. If there is any structure it's loosely based around a man sort of interviewing Grey at a restaurant, her demeanor calm but elusive, politely answering some questions and edging around others, and the action and dramatic tone wavers so much from documentary and fiction that it's impossible to separate it. But it's not really naturalism either, though it could be considered that. This is in another way why it's akin to a Godard film: it's highly stylized, maybe so much so that its intention is precisely to provoke in its choices in a distanced frame or a device obscuring faces or even faces out of focus in the foreground as they speak with the background at a bar in focus.

The Girlfriend Experience is also a surprising, if not show-stopping or breakthrough, showcase for Sasha Grey, who has a kind of dirty beauty which she can hide away with her natural sophistication. Though it's not part of the story, there was something that Soderbergh saw in Grey from her porn film experience (it's a similar thing as say casting a professor in Umberto D: he's not playing one, but you can sense the life experience on the face and in the body expressions, the spirit), and its hard to look away from her. Nor even for her personal trainer boyfriend. At worst, it's got some acting that is sub-par, like a rehearsal for a scene that still needs work before being shot but is filmed as a final workshop. But at best we see this torn and bewildering couple who are close but have that block of her "job" sleeping with other men- and the character's proclivity to look for a birthday as a sign of a connection- as something captivating. Even the city, as filmed by Soderbergh as a place with looming buildings and street musicians surrounding the well-to-do, is a character to speak of.

But, as with Soderbergh's other "experiments", saying it's not for everyone is an understatement to end all others. It's so polarizing you can feel the icicles forming from the breath in the theater. Maybe it was wise on his part to make this available o

The Girlfriend Experience fmovies. Was it a masterpiece? No. Was it quality Soderbergh? Yes-but that's not saying much (Full Frontal, anyone?). It made me think of Annie Hall and Chasing Amy. Annie Hall for its non-linear-yet-still-very-easy-to-follow narrative style (think of a toned down Limey). Chasing Amy because...well, because Kevin Smith used to always say that he tried to dispel misconceptions about relationships and sexuality with that 'film.' Whether or not he succeeded, I 'dunno'-but Soderbergh certainly has a lot more to say and does so rather proficiently with this movie. The running time for this think-piece is a blessed 77 minutes and strangely enough I could not pause the cable box and step away (even though I needed a cigarette since BEFORE the movie began). That's saying something. Decent date flick? I'd say so--but only if you're with someone cerebral or a whore. Enjoy.

What a disappointment. The film comes over as having had no script to begin with. Everybody's chit-chatting along, the camera (manned by the man himself - and one hears he tried to channel Antonioni - what's he smoking) is so utterly boring, the frames so stilted, action so terribly stagy - what actually is this movie. Not to mention the 'infamous' RED camera: the movie looked like it was shot with some miniDV camera with all highlights totally blown and no depth to the images. Mixed lighting is a mixed blessing, no matter what camera - somebody please forward that to the 'cinematographer'. And then there's 'sound': I can see that there's not even a name assigned in the IMDb credit's list. No wonder - I wouldn't put my name there. It seems for Soderbergh it's enough to slap some wires onto the actors (but really really deep under some layers of clothe to make it really sound mumbly-jumbly) and voila, we've replaced the sound department. Only question left is, who is coming up with money for productions like that. Really really bad and completely uninspired 'product'.

And don't get me wrong. I like those movies too: In the mood for love, from WKW. Genius!

But here... nothing does really work. First of all: Sasha Grey - she might be good at moaning and stuff, but as a real actress: she looks bored out of her frickin mind the whole movie! And that was how i felt the whole movie! Once again, not much happens in the movie, what would be fine if you compensated it with character development, or beautiful shots, or even some nice editing not to mention soundtrack. But nothing of that is really there. Im a big fan of fragmented editing but it doesn't work if you have no story to tell! Also the excessive comments about elections and the economics moment in the movie, will just make it look outdated in a few years. hell, i just watched it and felt it a lil outdated.

there's no commercial appeal in this movie, and no art appeal either. there were exactly 8 people in the theater besides me and my GF. And none of them seemed very enthusiastic when the lights were on again.