Flasz On Film

Tucked somewhere between Ocean’s Thirteen and Contagion, the 2009 The Girlfriend Experience belongs to a subset of Steven Soderbergh’s directorial efforts which fly under most people’s radars. It’s one of those movies I like to refer to as one of the ones “for him” not “for others”, as it is definitely an experimental venture whose aim is not to please general audiences, but rather to challenge them both in terms of its form and the narrative content.  

Weirdly enough, the film’s main claim to notoriety comes from the fact Soderbergh cast Sasha Grey (a prolific porn actress) in the lead role as a sophisticated escort whose business gimmick is that she offers her clients the titular girlfriend experience. For the right price – and it’s steep, I can only imagine – Chelsea can become your companion for the day. She’ll go to dinner with you. Listen to you talk about your problems. She will tell you all about hers. She will be your girlfriend in every sense of the word within the confines of a predetermined time slot. And then she’ll go back to her own life, her apartment, her real boyfriend and aspirations.  

What I find truly fascinating about this exceedingly short filmmaking experiment is how much it smuggles within its lean running time. That’s because most of the critical discourse surrounding the movie, such as it was, revolved mostly around discussing Sasha Grey’s acting chops and Soderbergh’s directorial genius in being able to bring out so much out of a mostly untrained performer… and one whose reputation perhaps overshadowed her own innate personality. Therefore, The Girlfriend Experience ended up billed as a slice-of-life experiment where a bona fide adult performer was given enough space and encouragement by an extraordinary director to not only dispel any myths about her talents, but also contribute to a tonally subdued conversation about the American Dream and finding humanity while the world is seemingly crumbling around you. 

But that’s not the end of it, because there’s more to be found in this seemingly minor entry in Soderbergh’s vast and eclectic catalogue. The Girlfriend Experience also functions as a fiendishly clever metaphorical take on the filmmaker’s pet subject to which he has been consistently coming back over the course of his career – his own relationship with the medium of film. Now, Soderbergh has always remained married to his youthful proclivity to devote himself to the form, more so than to the narrative which is why I have always billed him as one of the foremost 90s New Wave auteurs who – inadvertently or otherwise – carried out the legacy of nouvelle vague. He’s more an experimentalist than he is a storyteller, as he views many of his projects, especially those smaller and more personal ones, as filmmaking challenges. Be it crafting a 40s film noir using modern means (The Good German), doing a Lester-esque comedy of surrealism (Schizopolis), reimagining a classic of science fiction (Solaris), putting on a Dostoevsky-type play with a full cast of amateurs (Bubble),  Soderbergh has consistently remained aware that what he was making were movies and that those movies had something to say about moviemaking itself as well.  

The Girlfriend Experience is no different in this regard. For all I care, it is a movie with a false bottom under which it hides a nuanced conversation that elevates it to the highest echelons of cinematic accomplishment, at least as far as Soderbergh’s own catalogue is concerned. Why? Because it’s all fine and dandy to view this pared down and slick drama as a universal exploration of the human condition elevated by a stunning performance that nobody ever expected Sasha Grey could deliver. But what if I told you that Sasha Grey’s character is also a symbol of something else? What if she was a symbolic embodiment of cinema and an allegorical stand-in for Steven Soderbergh as well? 

If you apply this interpretation and look past the superficial conversations about American economy, Chelsea’s professional aspirations and her relationship woes, you might see what I see – a conversation on cinema where Chelsea’s character symbolizes cinema’s archetypal mission of offering escapist entertainment. What she offers – again, the titular girlfriend experience – is nothing but a dream. And movies are dreams. At the most fundamental level, films offer us an escape from the woes of the real world. They are a refuge from financial problems, marital issues and whatever else you might be going through, because for two hours at a time you get to hang onto the shoulder of a suave superspy, a loveable criminal or Batman. You get to be whisked away into the neverland of spectacle, special effects and magic. Cinema pulls wool over your eyes for an agreed period of time and lets you think you are elsewhere. Cinema is a girlfriend experience that pretends your life doesn’t exist for a few hours before easing you back into it, hopefully still enjoying nicely elevated dopamine levels and sufficiently decompressed and energized to face your life once more.  

In fact, this is who Chelsea deals with. Her clients are just filmgoers. They all carry their own baggage, anxieties and worries into their initial encounters with her, but thanks to her magic touch – the magic touch of cinema – they get their release. Some, like the jeweller at the end of the film, seem perfectly satisfied with just looking at a trailer, if you know what I mean. Others may be likely to develop a deeper connection with her, just like some film fans fall in love with movies they watch. What is more, Soderbergh uses this metaphorical interpretation to interrogate the interplay between the movie, the viewer and the critic in a bit more detail and – using the simple and relatable assumption that Chelsea has a personality – anthropomorphizes the concept of a movie and proceeds from there to make a few meta-comments about the difference between how a viewer perceives a movie, how a critic does, and how the movie sees itself.  

To that end, Soderbergh suggestively positions a film critic as the villain in this scenario by way of encapsulating this archetype in the persona of “The Erotic Connoisseur”, a veritable sleazebag with whom Chelsea agrees to have sex in exchange for a review on his allegedly industry-leading website, which may open doors to more opportunities for her. If you persist in seeing Grey’s character as a metaphorical avatar for cinema as she recounts her experience with this despicable human being and hear quotes from his scathing review of his “girlfriend experience” with her, you shall immediately recognize the cutting commentary embedded in there. It is as though Soderbergh wanted film critics – people who are most likely to uncover this message hidden in the film’s metaphorical interpretation – to take stock of their own work and realize that their words have an impact. Moreover, that their words can be hurtful.  

I honestly believe this little scene, which mostly slots in perfectly together with other more overt themes prevalent in the movie, functions as a veiled way for Soderbergh to take a stab at the critical community, which this reading portrays as vile and irredeemable on the basis of the simple fact they can destroy someone’s work as though they were lifeless objects you get to pass opinion on and use without much consideration. However, if Chelsea is cinema, then movies are people. And if movies were people, would your critical analysis of them change? Would you consider their emotions? Would you think how your opinion might make them feel? Perhaps, The Girlfriend Experience is a subtle invitation to be less callous and more appreciative of the simple fact that films have feelings too.  

We tend to focus squarely on what movies can do for us, what entertainment value they can bring to our lives, that we fail to give them space to exist on their own terms. While Chelsea is an escort who provides a girlfriend experience to her clients, this is not her life. It’s her job. Her life is elsewhere. In fact, Chelsea is not her name. Her real name is Christine. She has passions, relationships, anxieties, ambitions and desires. She yearns for connection, comfort and understanding like any other human being. By the same token, the movie asks you – the viewer and the critic – to see it not as a product put there for your enjoyment, but as a person you are entering into a relationship with.  

This is exactly why The Girlfriend Experience is such an ingenious piece of filmmaking that easily fits near the top of Steven Soderbergh’s output. It makes a stunning use of its central (and equally controversial) casting in that it deploys it in service of its thematic expression. I’m sure when Sasha Grey’s character is interacting with other people on the screen and hides her real thoughts behind her characteristic smirk, we all have ideas as to what she hides behind her eyes. This is not a coincidence. It’s all there for you to let your imagination run wild and for you to lose yourself in thinking what your girlfriend experience with her would look like. But the movie that follows successfully shows why such thinking is not only erroneous but fundamentally insensitive.  

By suggesting that Sasha Grey’s character in The Girlfriend Experience is an avatar for cinema, Steven Soderbergh invites all of us to find humanity in our criticism and even our basic interactions with movies we watch. Even though many of them begin their lives as products designed for our consumption and visceral entertainment, they are best treated as though they were people. In fact, some movies are people.