The Girlfriend Experience Reviews

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this flick but since I have a weak spot for Steven Soderbergh’s work, I was really eager to check it out. Soderbergh is a very profilic director, very often releasing 2 movies in the same year but I’m not sure if it is a really a good thing since the quality of these multiple productions are rather disputable. Anyway, from time to time, he manages to make some more experimental features like ‘Bubble’ or ‘Full Frontal’. ‘Full Frontal’ was a disjointed mess, a terrible bore fest but ‘Bubble’ was pretty good, even if it didn’t blow me away like good old Roger Ebert. This feature was another experiment basically ending between those two, quality wise. First of all, the first surprising thing is that even though the main character was played by a notorious porn star and even though she was playing a high-end escort, there was actually no sex scene whatsoever. I’m pretty sure that many guys watched this flick hoping they will see some piece of action. Well, they must have been pretty disappointed. Personally, I didn’t bother me at all, in the contrary. This way, the whole thing was not exploitative whatsoever. Basically, it was more about the interactions between this escort girl and her clients and I thought it was really intriguing. Furthermore, I thought that Sasha Grey was actually pretty good. I mean, I read here and there that she was emotionless showing a terrible lack of acting talent but I don’t agree. In my opinion, the lack of emotion was perfect for the character and I thought there was something actually quite captivating about Grey’s presence and charisma. I would like to see her in another mainstream feature which has nothing to do with the sex industry, just to see if she could pull it off. Still, to be honest, the whole thing didn’t work very well, unfortunately. First of all, was it me or did half of the movie take place in restaurants and bars?! I wonder if it was done in purpose but it seemed rather redundant at some point. Another thing that bothered me even more was the random chronology. Basically, I spent the whole movie trying to fit the different pieces together which was a frustrating waste of time. Seriously, it is a gimmick which annoys more every time I see it because, most of the time, it doesn’t help or enhance the story at all. Especially in this case, it seems that they used it to mask the fact that there was no real storyline but just a bunch of half-baked sub-plots. And finally, that’s the last thing that bothered me. Indeed, there were way too many little stories going on and many were not interesting at all, especially the ones involving the boyfriend (his trip to Vegas or his work at the gym are just a few samples.) To conclude, it was not really a great movie, far from it, but there was still something quite mesmerizing about it and I think it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Steven Soderbergh’s work.

Sasha Grey is not sexy. Sasha grey is the sex. It's the only interest of this movie. No history, no dialogue, correct acting, and nothing else.

well, I wasn't expecting anything from Sasha Grey and, in the end, I believe she did a pretty good job.
The story is intentionally superficial but it becomes interesting due to the way it was edited. So, points for Soderberg. It wasn't his best work, but definitely not his worst as well. 7/10

Let me start off by saying I cannot stand Sasha Grey to begin with, even before she starred in this film.

That being said I can't stand this film. I do have to give it points for the whole 'indie feel' thank god this wasn't a motion picture or anything. A movie about a high class call girl? Really? What is there to say?

This film first off is emotionless. You don't feel for any of the characters. They are all dry and zombie like. They ALL talk about the same thing. The economy, the election, how they are only making 500,000 bucks a year instead of 700,000 (oh dear god! I can't pay for my gold encrusted floors!) and then the film tries to make you feel for this call girl whos making 10,000 bucks tops per customer just to listen to rich guys talk about this boring and meanless nonsence. Sorry it's just not working for me.

Sasha Grey did a horrible job acting. Sorry if you disagree. She has these facial expressions as if she's in the type of film she usually does. In the fight scene between her and her boyfriend which was obviously a big deal, I don't think the anger in her voice went past a 4/10. It was not convencing that she was tired of her boyfriend and had found someone else.

The 'diary' entries that she started in the beginning and eventually it just stopped shortly after like 30 minutes of the film were dumb and just about the dullness of the guys shes escorts. Why would anyone want to hear/ read about how dull people are?

Overall: This film is shit. Bleh. Other than the whole 'indie' feel this has nothing. I again, wash my hands, of this film.

I feel like Sasha Grey needs to stick with what she does best.

An emotionally flat motion picture that mostly squanders the endless potential it had, especially considering the themes it explores. I know this sounds like pretty negative criticism for a film that was created by a director of Steven Soderbergh's caliber, but there's no avoiding the truth: save for a few scenes, The Girlfriend Experience is a dramatically inert movie.

Every once in a while, Soderbergh takes a break from having fun with the Ocean's Eleven caper franchise, and gives us small indie films that tend to be more thought-provoking. Twenty years ago, he gave us greatness using that approach with sex, lies and videotape (which I watched again a few weeks ago, and I'm amazed at how its insights on psychosexual matters still feel so relevant). He aims to achieve equal greatness with his latest dialogue-based indie film, and while the movie's not without its moments, it misses the mark, falling way behind the 1989 film and several of Soderbergh's other cinematic efforts.

The film tells the story of a Manhattan call girl who works for one of those escort service companies. Chelsea (Sasha Grey) deals with several situations she comes across in that profession, while trying to balance that with maintaining her relationship with her boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos), who works as a trainer at a gym. There's another key part to the storyline, and it's the fact that it's set in October 2008 during the few days prior to the presidential election, and focuses on the general paranoia that there was at the time about the financial hardships the U.S. was facing, and the economic proposals that each of the two candidates was making.

The Girlfriend Experience gets off on the right foot, particularly in terms of weaving the political and financial subjects into the problems that both Chelsea and Chris face, but curiously, the movie loses sight of this, and eventually, we forget that it's set during the pre-election days because it no longer seems to have relevance to the plot. Even worse, the film's last scene makes a cheap attempt at reminding us of this, by having a character suggest to Chelsea which candidate she should vote for, and this is very clearly an instance of "Oh, crap, we forgot to have more of the political subtext during the middle chunk of the movie; let's just insert this line in the last scene."

But this would be a minor quibble if everything else in The Girlfriend Experience worked effectively, which it doesn't. Initially, the audience gets to listen to voiceovers in which we hear what Chelsea writes down in her "book" (which is a journal in which she makes note of all the details of her dates), and these voiceovers are a great way to get a glimpse into our main character. Sadly, they disappear suddenly, and instead, the film takes an awfully jarring turn by showing events out of order - it's an editing technique that has worked amazingly well in plenty of other films, but serves very little purpose in this one.

The dramatic scenes in this film that should radiate emotional power are instead dull and lifeless. Sasha Grey is a former adult film star who is making her first appearance in a non-porn movie, and it's quite clear that she was a great casting choice for this role based on her past experience, but the film just doesn't give her much room to display her range (there are several problematic scenes in which Soderbergh seems to deliberately choose NOT to show us her face, when we are actually in severe need of seeing her reaction in order to develop some form of emotional investment in the character). Chris Santos speaks his lines as if he were acting on neutral - no higher or lower levels of intensity. He merely recites, rather than controlling his voice inflections so that they reflect what his character is going through, and this brings disastrously bad results particularly during a scene in which boyfriend Chris confronts Chelsea about wanting to go away for a weekend with one of her clients.

The Girlfriend Experience does deserve credit for some moments in which its matter-of-fact approach to business-related affairs is both eerily realistic and entirely relevant to the current state of affairs, and it's also hard to ignore what a great concept for a film this is. Sadly, it's all so lackluster and frustratingly incapable of capturing emotion from its characters, that it's impossible to consider it a cinematic success. There's a scene in the movie in which we hear a guy giving Chelsea a lukewarm review of her, um, performance as an escort. I'd consider this one of the script's stronger moments, were it not for the painfully obvious scene that follows it, in which we hear someone singing the words "Everybody's a critic." Still, the words that that guy uttered in his lukewarm review of Chelsea's performance ("definitely will not show you a great time") are appropriate, because those words would fit just as easily into a review of this film.

A faux documentary shot almost completely in a soul-less manner, it still manages to retain a certain rawness that makes it compelling, at least in parts. I'm not sure what Steven Soderbergh was aiming for here, I don't think he does either. Ultimately, it feels like an excuse to put Sasha Grey on the big screen to see what could come of it, and that, it does succeed at.