Starring Sasha Grey and Chris Santos
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Aaah...the struggles of an escort in a committed relationship. Goshdarnit...having sex with a bunch of men for money while trying to maintain some happiness with an actual boyfriend is apparently really tough work. That's the jist of The Girlfriend Experience, a film that's really only known for being a movie released in actual theaters that starred a porn star.
I guess the driving plot point in this movie is when Chelsea meets a client who appears to be the perfect relationship match for her based off of her "personology" books (apparently some type of astrological bs). In an irrational state, she decides to leave her boyfriend for the guy. If that's the driving point of the plot, I'm unsure why it doesn't occur until 50 minutes into this 75-minute long movie.
And therein lies the problem with this flick...it's got an interesting premise, but it goes nowhere. The first third of this movie felt interminable. Sure, it picked up a tad, but not enough to actually interest me in the characters.
I'm sure that Sasha Grey's performance didn't help. She's so incredibly bland onscreen...there's no life behind her eyes (although, I guess in her business, the eyes aren't really where the life is required to be). There's scenes where she does voiceover work where her diction is so ridiculously laughable.
It's certainly not all Grey's fault, though. It seems like much of this flick was improv'ed or ad-libbed. There are times when ad-libbing sounds "real," but here it didn't ring true at all...it just led to a lot of repetition, stuttering, and "uhm's." And even in a film with this short length, there were scenes that totally could've been cut (can anyone who sees this explain the last scene to me? What the heck was that?) Soderbergh should have known where to draw the line on some of these scenes...and he doesn't really help with the direction either. For several scenes, he just plops the camera down in one spot and lets it sit there. In a boring movie, boring camera work doesn't help matters. And let's not even get into the fact that he has the movie jump around in time (I'm guessing to cover up the inanity of it all). It's really not clever, especially in a movie where there's no plot to speak of...it's just annoying.
Oddly enough, in the end, I didn't hate the movie (although, as you'll see in the rating, it isn't any good). It was an interesting film idea that, unfortunately, in the end, amounts to nothing. I will say this, though...I enjoy the clever tagline on the poster: See it with someone you ****
The RyMickey Rating: D
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