#The girlfriend experience 2009 movie online free#
The story sees five non-consecutive days of her life, she is finding recently that she is not seeing as many clients and wanting to make more money, so she arranges to meet a sleazy Interviewer (Mark Jacobson) who has met many other escorts to give them a review of an experience with them, most getting positive description and boosting their profiles to get more clients, but he says he should get a free session. Chelsea charges $2,000 an hour for all clients from all backgrounds, and for that she offers the "girlfriend experience" (GFE), where she acts like a girlfriend towards her clients, dressing for what they have in mind, whether it is dinner and a movie, or a hotel meeting, she will listen to their conversations, and with mostly business consumed clients they will mostly talk about work and finances, and of course having sex with them.
Basically, set during the time of the 2008 Presidential Election, between Barack Obama and John McCain, in the city of Manhattan, the story centres around the life of high class call girl and escort Chelsea, real name Christine (Sasha Grey), and the many challenges she faces between work and her personal life. I first saw the well-known former XXX hardcore porn star in the low budget terrible horror film Smash Cut, and this film from director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brocjovich, Traffic, Ocean's Eleven) sounded like her kind of territory, and a return to the director's Sex, Lies, and Videotape beginnings. It is worth seeing because of the nature of it but even with an open mind it is likely that it will not take over you the way that you would want it to. It has much of interest in the visuals, specific dialogue scenes, the parallels in the characters and the casting/performances but it just never comes together in the way one would hope. The Girlfriend Experience is not that great a film unfortunately. Santos works well with her as he does the same sort of role but in a different trade, while the various clients are all solid turns that don't detract.
She has a naturalism and sadness to her character that works well and does both convince and engage. There is a school of thought that pornography involves no acting skills at all, usually people think this until they see porn with a woman who cannot act to save her life – it is awful stuff and Grey's adult roles show she can perform there as well as she does here. The key PR move was of course the casting of Sasha Grey and she does do a really good turn here – although why everyone is shocked about this I'm not sure. Soderbergh directs with a dimly lit but yet attractive view of things, giving the film a real good feel that would have done well to enforce the material if it had been stronger. OK so it still mostly held my attention and I understood the obvious narrative parallels between the lives of the various characters in how the "became" something for others in return for money but this is not the same as it working and being as intelligent as it thinks it is – it isn't. The film was so clearly "saying" something (as opposed to "doing" something) that it became frustrating to me that it didn't say it clearer and with more conviction. Although it is a very short film this work did start to tire me and I'll be honest and say that it didn't really work for me. Here and there I made sense of it but too often it seemed to be deliberately hard to grasp or indeed perhaps just not hold together as well as it should have done. To a point this engages reasonably well because the whole time I was watching it I was working to try and relate what was being said about the business world with what was being shown in regards the escort service. In terms of actual plot it must be stated that there is not really a start, middle, end in a traditional narrative sense but rather more of a flow of discussion and characters. What this translates into in reality is a film that has lots of discussions that provide material on relationships that are some variant on personal, sexual, financial or a mix of all three.
I say this because this is not a film about sex or pornography or prostitution but rather one about commodities, trading, money and the nature of relationships where these things are involved. The Girlfriend Experience got headlines due to its casting, sparking discussions over the nature of porn in the mainstream without anyone ever pausing to realise that this film does not represent porn in the mainstream, but rather someone who does porn also doing "proper" acting.