Steven Soderbergh has directed 20 feature films in the last 20 years – a dizzying total given the time-consuming demands of the studio system and the unpredictable financing output of the independent milieu. Terrence Malick he is not. Soderbergh’s prodigious output has arisen from several contributing factors, including that he is more often curious than committed when it comes to his subject matter, and a desire to strip back the filmmaking apparatus. In other words he moves fast and doesn’t always leave fingerprints.
Those elements are on display in his latest work, The Girlfriend Experience, a digital feature made for less than $2 million on location in New York City. Credited to writers David Levien and Brian Koppelman (Ocean’s Thirteen, Rounders), but reportedly improvised to a large degree, the film pricks the supposed authentic intimacy of low-budget productions by being concerned with living your life as a commodity.
The protagonists, Christine (Sasha Grey) and Chris (Chris Santos), are, respectively, a high-class escort and a personal trainer. But per Soderbergh’s disdain for moral judgments, both are mere professionals looking to maximise their business opportunities. Christine, who works as Chelsea, is the more successful: she charges several thousand dollars for a night’s work as a surrogate partner, conversing with her clients over dinner, sleeping together and then swapping New York Times sections over breakfast the following morning. She clocks on and off as a sympathetic, supportive girlfriend.
In a literal demonstration of his point regarding the body-as-asset, Soderbergh has cast Sasha Grey as Christine. The 21-year-old has been working in the adult film industry since turning 18, a career distinguished from her contemporaries by her lack of plastic surgery, a predilection for extreme subject matter and a self-referencing intellectual framework that includes mid sixties Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni; she is a porn star without the industry’s usual vulgar accoutrements.
Grey plays the character as being comfortable as Chelsea and uncertain as Christine. Interviewed by a journalist (Mark Jacobson) writing a piece on her business niche she’s insightful about her professional bearing and uncertain of where she begins personally, while diary entries delivered as voiceover are rendered deliberately lifeless and begin with a recitation of the designer labels she’s wearing to suggest a suitable anomie.
The picture is already dated in a way, because it’s a period piece from the final weeks of the George W. Bush presidency, with Barack Obama looming on the horizon and the financial markets careening downwards after the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. Christine’s wealthy clients are nervous and uncertain and their doubt is a virus that infects her. She wonders about her investments and rashly gets involved with a website operator (Glenn Kenny) who reviews and markets escorts, in a bid to increase her clientele and stave off the emergence of a rival.
Her downfall, ultimately, comes not from a legal or financial failing, but a personal one. As if she realises that something is absent from her life, which is as blank as a wiped hard disk, Christine indulges her personal philosophy, derived from an offshoot of astrology she calls 'personology", to draw closer to a client and in turn alienate Chris. In a worldview where only the bottom line matters her deviation from the rules of her business can only be punished (likewise the entire movie can be seen as a metaphor for the modern’s director’s struggle to survive in Hollywood).
Soderbergh’s handheld aesthetic is busy but never tries to be incisive in terms of character. The most telling shots of Christine and Chris are stock standard set-ups that show them watching television or eating takeout for dinner in an apartment with a lavishly fitted out kitchen – outside work they’re like machines at rest, waiting to be turned on. Whether Soderbergh sees that as a mindset that ended with the Global Financial Crisis, or recessionary one just starting, is unclear, but this brisk study of commercial culture is nonetheless intriguing.
