The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

If you have ever wondered what the life of a high-class Manhattan call girl is like, then The Girlfriend Experience might be just up your alley. Steven Soderbergh’s film puts you in the shoes of a two-thousand dollar an hour prostitute named Chelsea, who is played by actress Sasha Grey, a famous porn star. The film follows Chelsea through five days of work, as she visits many of her wealthy clientele during the October of 2008, and uses a loosely mixed up narrative structure to tell its story. The film claims to be “experimental” but I didn’t find it too difficult to follow or have it use too many self indulgent techniques that the term “experimental” seemed to indicate.

The film does a great job at focuses on the trials and tribulations of the call girl profession. Chelsea has to be there for all her clients. Not simply physically but also emotionally and intellectually. As the film progresses we see that Chelsea finds things lacking in her own life and relationship with her personal trainer boyfriend. The difficulty of maintainin a long term relationship with a prostitute is explored quite well and provides most of the conflict in the film as Chelsea contemplates breaking up with her boyfriend.

The Girlfriend Experience is extremely low budget, and aside from a couple of the main characters, it uses mainly inexperienced amateur actors in many of the roles. This makes some of the acting seem a bit weak in some scenes as the actors are clearly improvising a lot of their lines and seem almost overacting a bit to appear casual. It works very well in other scenes like when Chelsea is interrupted by one of her johns on a date with her boyfriend and awkwardness ensues. I thought the casting of a porn star in the lead role was a little too obvious of a choice, but Shasa Grey worked well in this role. She was very believable and seemed to be a bit of an airhead but was very vulnerable too.

One of my favorite aspects of The Girlfriend Experience is the constant references to the economy and the 2008 presidential election that are made throughout the film. From Wall Street big shots betting on how many electoral votes Obama will take, to a Hassidic Jew client urging Chelsea to vote for McCain in order to save the state of Israel, these exchanges really give the movie a sense of time and place, and will make the movie even more enjoyable to watch ten or twenty years in the future.

The Girlfriend Experience doesn’t really go anywhere, attempt to tackle anything really big, try something different. It is a slow, quiet movie, that is entertaining enough while it lasts but you won’t be thinking about it much after it finishes. Much like a real prostitute.

7/10