The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

Who knew there are literally multiple guys in New York who will pay you over $2000/hour so that you smile and nod when they give out achingly banal investment advice such as "you should buy gold"? (Answer: many, many people.) Still, one of the appeals of this film is that the men are never portrayed as completely irredeemable losers who are worried only by their ego (pace Ebert); just variously compromised members of a society that encourages, and perhaps even rewards, this kind of behaviour writ large.

I love the scenes in which you realise that it's just business and exploitation all the way down... and up. In particular, when the web designer guy is trying to lock Chelsea into a retainer contract, just as her remarks about "X did not schedule another date" suggest that she prefers arrangements of this kind from her own clients as well. Not unrelatedly, Chelsea's deadpan narration and affect reminded me of those from American Psycho (2000).

In their review, Nick Schager & Matt Noller suggest that the 'Erotic Coinnesseur' critic is something of a stand-in for Soderbergh, being he is "another provider of gorgeous, remote entertainments." It's a good observation, but there is an argument to be made that the journalist writing a feature is a better candidate, if only it acknowledges that both the 'long-form article' and the medium of film are not only exploitative and extractive, but can never really avoid the framing of those who make or write them. And, of course, that Chelsea is as closed off to the reporter as she is in the film more broadly.

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.

[…]

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.

— A. O. Scott (The New York Times, 2009)

Only in retrospect can the story be pieced together with a reasonable degree of coherence. Then again, since plot is not a primary characteristic, the fact we're being fed disconnected "moments" is of minimal import. The point seems to be that Chelsea lives in the present and that's how The Girlfriend Experience represents her life, without concern of how the "past" and "future" fit.

— James Berardinelli (ReelViews)

By paying money for the excuse of sex, they don’t have to say: I am lonely. I am fearful. I am growing older. I am not loved. My wife is bored with me. I can’t talk to my children. I’m worried about my job, which means nothing to me. Above all, they are saying: Pretend you like me.

— Roger Ebert

s someone who’s spent over a dozen years around the sex industry, six of those in a committed relationship with a high-end hooker (so to real-life prostitution exposé reporter Mark Jacobson, who tells Chelsea that he’s “never met an escort in a committed relationship,” I reply, in all honesty, that I’ve never met an investigative journalist in a committed relationship)

— Lauren Wissot
(Slant Magazine)

Though many individual scenes are sharply observed, it amounts to the same observation over and over: Chelsea, Chris, and all their clients are whores, trapped in a transactional economy that isolates and dehumanizes even their most intimate encounters.

— Dana Stevens (Slate)