The Girlfriend Experience

The Girlfriend Experience is the first film with Sasha Gray that is worth watching until the end. And more than once. While only views of bodies are fragmented in porn, Soderbergh decided to break the whole narrative structure into fragments. He subsequently grouped the individual parts into discontinuous thematic clusters in a manner similar to that in which expository documentaries are organised. In its way, The Girlfriend Experience is actually a dual documentary portrait of people who are learning to sell themselves well. The static camera (with the exception of scenes from the plane, obviously shot with a mobile telephone) is placed atypically low, watching the characters from a distance or directly through the glass and only from a limited number of positions (instead of flexibly reacting to the actors’ movements). There is the illusion of shooting with an impersonal hidden camera, of not wanting to get under the characters’ skin and to express any empathy for their loneliness, but rather to merely give unbiased testimony about them. Distance and coolness in the colours, environment and camera work perfectly capture the nature of a world in which all relationships are profit-seeking and false, in which you even have to buy the feeling that someone cares about you and in which a person is perceived only through his or her “market” value, which can increase with the right contacts, luxury clothes or a positive web response (such as the number of "likes", which is not directly addressed here). Constantly increasing one’s own price is basically the sole purpose of the characters’ existence. Like the whole of The Girlfriend Experience, Christine’s life is a story without drama and without a point. Christine herself is logically unable to reflect on her existence beyond her limited mental horizons, i.e. beyond the empty, aimless description of the underwear that she wore, the bars that she visited and the stores where she shopped. Thanks to the drums in the soundtrack, shopping is what the main thing that enlivens the day, though it becomes apparent that this background music was not added to the action by the director (who would thus be uncharacteristically obliging toward the heroine, but by a drummer playing on the street. Soderbergh also inventively uses sound bridges, which shift the time-spatial orientation with respect to where we are (in time), whom we are watching and who is speaking, while concurrently bringing to the soundtrack the principle of many overlapping and disturbing visual layers, under which nothing of crucial importance is concealed. The Girlfriend Experience gives the impression of being a film without a clear concept. In reality, it is “nonconceptual” in a very well-thought-out way and, unlike the characters, who are unable to find greater meaning in their lives, it knows very well where it is going and why. You have to decide for yourself whether or not you will watch it, as the film itself will not compel you to do so. 80% (03/17/2020) (less) (more)