Steven Soderbergh shot “The Girlfriend Experience” over a few weeks last fall, with a relatively low budget, a portable high-definition video camera and a mostly nonprofessional cast. The film’s means are modest, not unlike the guerrilla techniques Mr. Soderbergh used in “Che,” but nonetheless “The Girlfriend Experience” has a sleek, tailored look appropriate to its setting, which is the moneyed precincts of Manhattan at the height — and most likely the end — of the recent gilded age. Every frame swims with signs of dearly bought, casually enjoyed luxury as the camera makes its way from high-end boutiques to jewelbox hotels, exclusive restaurants and the cabin of a private plane.
Chelsea (Sasha Grey), the main character — more case study than heroine — is not only a consumer of top-of-the line merchandise, keeping a careful ledger of the clothes and accessories she has purchased and worn. She is also a commodity in this rarefied market, a prostitute whose specialty is alluded to in the title of the movie. She offers her rich clients more than sex with an obliging, pretty young woman. Sometimes there is no sex at all, as when one of them is especially anxious about the collapsing financial system. What she sells instead, or in addition, is a simulation of intimacy.
The first scenes, of Chelsea in the company of a handsome, well-mannered customer, are presented as a kind of optical illusion. For all we know, these two attractive people chatting unhurriedly over dinner, then kissing and sipping wine on the couch before making their way to bed, are lovers of long standing and deep attachment. Only when cash changes hands in the morning do we perceive the transactional nature of the affair.
Up to now Ms. Grey’s screen performances have been almost entirely in hard-core pornography, and this professional background, along with her character’s profession, adds an aura of titillation to the movie. But “The Girlfriend Experience” is less interested in sex than in money, which is shown to be a far more powerful and dangerous source of obsession, confusion, passion and calculation. The movie follows Chelsea from one encounter to the next, and most of those that are not on the clock might be characterized as business meetings and strategy sessions.
She chats with an accountant and also with a curious journalist (played by the New York magazine writer Mark Jacobson), and pays a visit to a creepy sex geek whose Web site rates the services of New York’s escorts and who styles himself the Erotic Connoisseur. (He is played by Glenn Kenny, a film critic and entertainment writer — and thus a cordial screening-room acquaintance of mine — with a combination of grandiose self-regard and theatrical self-disgust that recalls Orson Welles in his Paul Masson wine commercials.) What Chelsea reveals, as she tries to refine her marketing strategies and improve her brand, is not that everyone is a whore — equating capitalism with prostitution would be an easy, moralizing route for the film to take — but rather that everyone is hustling, trying to get a bit of leverage in a tough economic climate.
Chelsea, which might not be her real name, has a live-in boyfriend named Chris (Chris Santos), who works as a personal trainer, tending to the bodies of some of the same kinds of guys who hire Chelsea for her services. The similarities between them are established a little too pointedly, but they are nonetheless thought provoking. Both Chris and Chelsea belong to a sector of the economy that depends on the blurring of certain distinctions, between service and friendship, say, or profit and affection. Therapists, exercise instructors, nannies, manicurists, bartenders — when you think about it, they are all paid for something that can easily be mistaken for love.
“The Girlfriend Experience” traces this potential category mistake in both directions. One john, as he and Chelsea strip down, rhapsodizes about the communication between them, which of course is the basis for any successful relationship. (“Yeah, totally,” she says, slipping between the sheets.) But Chelsea, who experiences a twinge of romantic jealousy — disguised, perhaps, as professional rivalry — when she sees a once-loyal client on the town with another escort, is not immune to such feelings and finds herself drawn to a sympathetic new customer in ways that throw her off balance.
This upsets Chris, and it also puts a crack in the movie’s smooth veneer of cynical indifference. The idea that Chelsea, the girlfriend for sale, is herself succumbing to the false allure of the girlfriend experience, is an interesting one, but neither the script, by Brian Koppelman and David Levien (who also wrote “Ocean’s Thirteen”), nor Ms. Grey’s cool, tentative acting can quite sustain the level of emotional complication necessary to bring it to dramatic life. Mr. Soderbergh’s fractured chronology and chilly, observant style don’t help matters. The film, having mystified Chelsea’s poise and made much of her gift for persuasive artifice, cannot manage the complication of her vulnerability or chart the terrain of her inner life.
And this may be the point, at least in part. “The Girlfriend Experience” is about, and also traffics in, the intoxification of surfaces, and to say it objectifies Ms. Grey, who is very young (just 21) and very pretty, would be more plot summary than critique. Ms. Grey, whose career in pornography has been distinguished both by the extremity of what she is willing to do and an unusual degree of intellectual seriousness about doing it, is not so much acting here as posing a series of philosophical problems, testing the conceptual and experiential boundaries between degradation and empowerment, predator and prey, person and commodity.
The problem is that these questions are more provocative than what the movie does with them. It is by turns tryingly obvious and irritatingly oblique. But I suspect that “The Girlfriend Experience,” which has been available on video on demand for the past month, may look different a few years from now.
Mr. Soderbergh, like Jean-Luc Godard in the second half of the 1960s, is less concerned here with finish or coherence than with an authentic, on-the-fly recording of a moment, and right now that moment — the weeks just before the last presidential election, when the financial system was in midcalamity — is at once too close and too emphatically in the past for it to make a lot of sense. But when the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the 10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around, this strange, numb cinematic experience may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.
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