The (Streaming) Girlfriend Experience
I’ve been meaning to write about Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, The Girlfriend Experience, for days now after watching the indie on Amazon.com. That’s right, Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh’s latest film hasn’t been released in theaters, but it’s already streaming online for a small rental fee.
Okay, a big rental fee. More than the price of a movie ticket in your average market.
When it comes right down to it, not many people are going to pay $9.99 for a three-day movie rental. But what irks me most about watching Soderbergh’s tale of a high-priced call girl trying to make a living in the middle of the current economic meltdown isn’t just its equally high-priced delivery. It’s the film’s low-end storytelling.
The Girlfriend Experience just isn’t that good. At best it’s a heavy-handed metaphor for losing your home on a bad gamble. Everything else is just novelty. From being able to watch the film on a computer before it hits theaters to the casting of Sasha Grey, an adult film star, in the lead, The Girlfriend Experience is proof positive that any gimmick can get people to pay attention to your movie. That goes for even the art house audience.
Don’t get me wrong, Sasha Grey is surprisingly adequate in the lead role. She displays the requisite amount of anxiety as she is questioned by a reporter about being a call girl in a committed relationship. With Soderbergh directing her, she’s almost passable as an actor. And the film’s delivery method, part Hulu, part Netflix, would certainly have me coming back to Amazon for a better film at half the cost. Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, however, is terribly uninteresting, and the non-linear narrative structure merely forces the audience to pay closer attention to something they wouldn’t otherwise bother to follow.
The Girlfriend Experience is more an exercise in film production experimentation than it is a movie created for an audience. The delivery, casting, and filming (Soderbergh was apparently ready to marry the RED camera after using it to shoot this movie) are audacious enough, but unlike Soderbergh’s last small production Bubble, you can’t find a point of entry or even just a sympathetic character to help you into this picture.
You’d think Soderbergh would have taken a cue from his subject and just given us whatever we desired instead of forcing the real Soderbergh on us. But that’s Soderbergh in a nutshell, isn’t it? He’s a man fascinated by the process of making his own movies. Sometimes we’re equally fascinated. With The Girlfriend Experience, we aren’t.
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