The Girlfriend Experience (2009)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Chelsea is an in-demand call girl whose $2,000 an hour price tag allows her to live in New York's lap of luxury. Besides her beauty and sexual skill, Chelsea offers her clients companionship and conversation, or, as she dubs it, "the girlfriend experience." With her successful business and a devoted, live-in boyfriend, Chelsea thinks she has it made... until a new client rocks her world.
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21 films that influenced The Girlfriend Experience
What critics say influenced The Girlfriend Experience
In both metaphor and technique, The Girlfriend Experience echoes such '60s-vintage Jean-Luc Godard films as My Life to Live and Two or Three Things I Know About Her.
This isn't Breakfast at Tiffany's; this isn't even Klute.
There’s an unforgettable moment in “Klute” where Jane Fonda’s hooker character peeks at her watch while pretending to be in the throes of orgasm; Chelsea seems to operate entirely in watch-peeking mode.
In appearance her Chelsea recalls Alison Lohman’s transient foster child in Peter Kosminsky’s White Oleander ““ a cool, pale canvas awaiting interpretation.
The Girlfriend Experience, like Soderberghâs 2005 film, Bubble, was made for Mark Cuban and Todd Wagnerâs 2929 Entertainment, as part of a six-picture deal to produce low-budget, digital films that would premiere simultaneously in multiple platforms.
Soderbergh can be a bit of a cold and superior fish, but surely even he knows that critics helped make "sex, lies and videotape" and continue to defend his most offbeat films ("The Limey," "Bubble") even when the "Ocean's" crowd stays away.
With the noirish Bubble (2005), director Steven Soderbergh initiated what he hopes will be a series of six microbudget features using nonactors, improvisation, and high-definition video, to be released on a variety of platforms.
The Girlfriend Experience harkens back to his fascinating micro-budget Bubble and to his offbeat British crime film The Limey , with its twitchy, time-jumping structure.
When Steven Soderbergh strays from his glossy, star-studded extravaganzas and makes the experimental films that are smaller, weirder and seemingly truer to his heart, they can work beautifully ("Solaris," "Bubble") or they're self-indulgent bores ("Full Frontal," "Che").
Sure, he’s crafted such commercial hits as Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Oceans franchise, but he always goes back to a more “personal” style of filmmaking, branching off and exploring the medium in efforts like Bubble, Full Frontal, and his most recent turn, The Girlfriend Experience.
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This drama about a high-priced call girl is his second installment, and like the first, it's a modest success that makes one wish Soderbergh could find some happy middle ground between funky experiments and Ocean's Eleven.
Soderbergh has balanced his ability to make commercial hits ( Ocean's Eleven, Erin Brockovich) with his desire to do more personal, innovative and political films – such as Traffic, The Good German or Schizopolis.
He makes bright, boisterous fun films (think Ocean's Eleven and Out Of Sight), cynical, smart personal meditations (sex, lies and videotape, The Limey), and Oscar grabs (Traffic, Erin Brockovich).
Despite its meager production values, The Girlfriend Experience looks sleek and appealing; it takes place in the same copper-toned cocoon of poshness that envelops the Ocean's Eleven franchise, as Grey's character, $2,000-an-hour call girl Chelsea, flits in and out of four-star restaurants and designer boutiques in Manhattan.
And for a while there, the film undeniably does feel like a carbon copy of Ocean's Eleven - complete with introductory sequences for each of the characters.
After the second sequel to his "Ocean's Eleven" remake and the ambitious "Che" biopic, director Steven Soderbergh scales back for one of his smaller, experimental indie films with "The Girlfriend Experience," shot on HD, written by "Ocean's" scribes Brian Koppelman & David Levien and featuring the 'mainstream' film debut of porn star Sasha Grey (it also features digital stills of doll parts projected on overhead bar monitors, a reference to his last small scale indie, "Bubble").
It is not Elizabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas or even Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
You want pretence, watch Pretty Woman.
Recurrent flashforwards to the trip, with the guys jabbering about sex and the bailout and Obama, jut into the narrative, giving the film the time-jumpy structure of Soderbergh's The Limey.
Soderbergh can be a bit of a cold and superior fish, but surely even he knows that critics helped make "sex, lies and videotape" and continue to defend his most offbeat films ("The Limey," "Bubble") even when the "Ocean's" crowd stays away.
The Girlfriend Experience harkens back to his fascinating micro-budget Bubble and to his offbeat British crime film The Limey , with its twitchy, time-jumping structure.
He makes bright, boisterous fun films (think Ocean's Eleven and Out Of Sight), cynical, smart personal meditations (sex, lies and videotape, The Limey), and Oscar grabs (Traffic, Erin Brockovich).
Out of Sight and Traffic contained a wide variety of film stocks and filters, while The Limey and The Underneath played around with time.
Cinematically, that is, the structure of the thing, how it was put together, how it "feels" as you're watching, the most obvious precursor is The Limey , which like GFE presents a reasonably simple story in a chronological patchwork of events taken all out of order and overlapping with one another, anchored around a single repeating moment whose exact point in the timeline isn't established until the end.
This isn't Breakfast at Tiffany's; this isn't even Klute.
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A rather uninteresting example of the small-scale films Soderbergh likes to do between more expensive and expansive movies like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, it has attracted considerable attention because the heroine is played by porn star Sasha Grey, though in fact the film features a lot of talk and very little sex.
Soderbergh has balanced his ability to make commercial hits ( Ocean's Eleven, Erin Brockovich) with his desire to do more personal, innovative and political films – such as Traffic, The Good German or Schizopolis.
He makes bright, boisterous fun films (think Ocean's Eleven and Out Of Sight), cynical, smart personal meditations (sex, lies and videotape, The Limey), and Oscar grabs (Traffic, Erin Brockovich).
Sure, he’s crafted such commercial hits as Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Oceans franchise, but he always goes back to a more “personal” style of filmmaking, branching off and exploring the medium in efforts like Bubble, Full Frontal, and his most recent turn, The Girlfriend Experience.
Soderbergh fait également sentir sa présence au coeur d’une démarche esthétique évidemment très distante en proposant un jeu de couleurs assez similaire à celui qu’il avait si habilement intégré à la facture du remarquable Traffic de 2000, notamment par cette prédominance de teintes bleuâtres venant renforcer à la perfection cette idée de vide et de désunion.
Running at a brisk 77 minutes, The Girlfriend Experience isn't on the scale of Soderbergh's more ambitious films, including the Oceans blockbusters, Oscar-winners such as Traffic and Erin Brockovich , and his epic Che .
It is not Elizabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas or even Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.