Movie Review: The Girlfriend Experience

Soderberg’s latest, The Girlfriend Experience (2009), continues his trend of intermingling small and large projects. Coming on the heals of the two-part Che series and the entertaining blockbuster Ocean’s Thirteen, the film follows a high priced call girl and her entrepreneurial trainer boyfriend as the financial crisis heats up on the heals of the election. The film was shot on a shoe string budget reported at $1.4 million and stars a real porn star, Sasha Grey. The narrative follows her as she meets with clients, makes business decisions, fights with her boyfriend and is interviewed in a restaurant by a journalist. As with most Soderberg films, hand held cameras capture much of the action and the film jumps around in time, centering on the interview.

What is interesting about the film, besides a decent acting job by Grey and the other relative unknowns who make up the cast, is the film’s underlying message about the cost of centering society on wealth and greed. In Sex, Lies and Videotapes, Soderberg deconstructed the changing nature of desire in a world where video and television had made the approximation of desire more interesting or enticing than its instantiation in the real (at least for some). Here he arguably moves on to a deeper issue, which is the ways in which people have commodified not only themselves but everyone around them. The journalist talks about her “iron door armor” and who she might open it up for. We find out it is not her boyfriend, who she is willing to toss aside after meeting a new client for one day – a client she decides to go away with for the weekend. In the end, the client doesn’t show up, explaining that we would feel too guilty leaving his wife and kids. It is the coldness she shows toward her boyfriend in explaining this new man that perfectly captures the nature of so many interactions today.

People have been taught to brand themselves to maximize their ability to sell themselves to whoever they want to entice, be it a movie or music agent, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a potential life mate or the businessman or boss they want to impress. In the process, the nature of relationships deteriorates, to the extent that instrumental rationality seems to become the foundation of friendship and love alike. This is obviously not the case with all, but I see it a lot in New York City and even more when I lived in Los Angeles. The process of commodification of love, happiness and friendship means more than alienation from others though, it could mean alienation from ourselves and our needs, wants and desires. This is exactly the point Marcuse made in Eros and Civilization and relates to Heidegger’s critique of an inauthentic existence. The character Sasha’s absence of affect as she makes decisions that affect not only her own life but those around her perfectly captures the nature of this alienation. She is not alienated from her labor per se, but from her deeper desiring system and real social connection. We also see this with her boyfriend Chris, who is constantly in the process of selling himself and his ideas, ultimately undermining his primary job.

The film has done only $680,765 domestically and thus has been seen by very few people. While the Ocean series essentially celebrates capitalism, though the sort of rogue capitalism that attacks traditional success (a nod to the true American Dream), here we see Soderberg provide a powerful critique of its deleterious effects on us as human beings and a society. Whether or not this was his intention, he again shows himself as possessing an uncanny ability to coexist in the world of megasuccess and true art, deconstructing society with a keen eye that builds on individual characters and their relationship to the surrounding world. This is what all good art does, and what Hollywood so often neglects to do. Too bad so few will actually see it. (A-)

P.S. On a side note, I happened to catch on F/X a few minutes of another film, Cruel Intentions, that critiques the excesses of contemporary society though with the usual Hollywood sensibility and simple moral ending. I flipped it on just as the infamous scene between Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair in Central Park began. What was odd was that it was missing a kind of essential aspect of that scene – the actual kiss that won them an MTV award. I was baffled until I thought about where it was on the dial and the absurdity and hypocrisy of contemporary American society. It’s certainly comforting to know that we are protecting our children from even a hint of gay sex, particularly as it takes them about ten seconds to find it on Google.