#The girlfriend experience 2009 film professional
Through her various relationships, both professional and personal, the men she encounters all try to steer her the way they believe she should go. Rather, Soderbergh and his writing duo David Levien and Brian Koppelman, who also wrote the last Ocean's movie, are instead juxtaposing Chelsea's role against this larger turmoil in order to examine how she herself has become commerce. This could be seen as a description of Chelsea, as well, that she has an emotional hole that is too large for any one man to fill, but I think this would be too simplistic. The hole in the system is seemingly too big to fill. There is talk of the impending bailouts and how they will not be enough. This is of particular importance given that The Girlfriend Experience is set during the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election, when the financial crisis was just getting underway. Most of her clients are well-to-do businessmen, and so quite a few of them give Chelsea advice about what to do with the money they pay her. She listens and responds and mostly leaves room for the men to indulge the illusion of being in charge. Chelsea is a smoky beauty, a girl of quiet charms. In the case of this film, the girlfriend-for-hire in question is Christine, who goes by the name Chelsea and is played by adult film actress Sasha Grey. In such cases, conversation can be as necessary as the buyer's particular peccadilloes. The title refers to a particular high-end service where the escort acts not just as a sex partner, but in some degree as the client's girlfriend, be it out in public or private intimacy. The Girlfriend Experience is, at its heart, the portrait of a call girl. Be it his turning away from glitz in Ocean's Twelve or the pseudo-documentary K Street or even the gonzo id explosion of Schizopolis, he's taken us down these roads before and he's always found plenty on the way. Yes, a filmmaker working on the fly and without concern for narrative convention can demand a lot of the audience, but Soderbergh is a director who should have earned our trust by now. Given the tepid response to Steven Soderbergh's recent excursion into digital verité, the nonlinear The Girlfriend Experience, you'd think the great director had finally fallen off his high wire and his constant cinematic daring had lead him to go splat. The element of surprise leads to new inspiration. And some things turn out better than expected. Some elements will yield the hoped for results, some fall short.
#The girlfriend experience 2009 film movie
The film is a semi-improvised take on modern relationships conducted in New York and in some ways harks back to the themes of Soderbergh’s breakthrough Sex, Lies and Videotape.Īs the city tumbles into recession, some businesses prove impervious to financial disaster, one such being ‘The Girlfriend Experience’, where a high-class escort service offers the emotional intimacy a girlfriend might, as well as the more traditional sexual services.Īdult movie actress Sasha Grey stars as Christine, the escort at the centre of the story and the film follows her as she moves around the city, meeting clients and trying to maintain her relationship with her boyfriend Chris, a personal trainer.Īs in Sex, Lies and Videotape, this is a film superficially about sex with no sexual content at its heart a more interesting discussion about honesty and intimacy in the modern world, about the transactions and transparency in human relationships.The nature of experiments is that you're never going to know how they turn out until they are done.
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This is Soderbergh’s 20th feature, shot in 16 days for a budget of $1.15 million, and is light years away from his Hollywood studio product such as Ocean’s Eleven.