A Tale of Three Viewings: THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (2009)

or: Alas, one of Steven Soderbergh’s lesser works in his prolific filmography.

First Viewing:

“If they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn’t be paying you.”

This was some of the longest 77 minutes I’ve ever sat through.

I don’t know how Steven Soderbergh could take such a theoretically intriguing idea for a story, and render it so affectless and monotonous and dry and distant and mind-numbingly boring, but the man sure found a way, and then some.

I remember at the time The Girlfriend Experience was making the rounds at festivals and then in cinemas, I was reading the coverage about it in Empire Magazine and Total Film (as that was where I got all my upcoming film information from, because it was in and around 2009, and I was yet to be chronically online), and the Big Thing that every article and interview and review honed in on with keen interest was Soderbergh’s casting of Sasha Grey in a relatively mainstream acting role, which these film magazines always mentioned was a left-field novelty due to her apparently being a well-known porn star. I distinctly recall Total Film, in their recurring segment that introduced and spotlighted up and coming new actors every issue, making a crass joke about Grey that said something to the effect of: “It’s alright, we know you know her best from Facefuckers 3000”, or some other such outrageous, (presumably?) made-up porn film’s title.

As his filmography would later attest, this wouldn’t be the last time Soderbergh cast a woman known from a profession other than film acting, and crafted a film around their persona, playing to their strengths, while also unearthing hitherto unexplored talents audiences might not have expected from them. He did it with Grey via The Girlfriend Experience, followed closely afterwards by doing Haywire with Gina Carano.
(In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to pick Carano to set her down the path of an acting career, what with her self-destructive conservatism undoing any goodwill her résumé accrued in the years post-Haywire, but hey, how could Soderbergh have known what she’d become?)

Sasha Grey’s career has been such a fascinating rollercoaster of different professions after The Girlfriend Experience. From former porn star, to mainstream-ish actress (Entourage; Would You Rather?; Open Windows; etc), to published author (The Juliette Society, a book I bought from a charity shop, but still haven’t read), to DJ and musician (FUN FACT: did you know that a track she did with Death In Vegas — ‘Consequences of Love’ — was the music you first hear in the Paris nightclub in Mission: Impossible — Fallout? Yeah, that’s Sasha Grey’s voice you hear in the song playing as Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill break into the place!); now she’s a regular Twitch streamer. No matter what you think of her as an actress (and I know a lot have said they don’t think she’s very good), you’ve got to admit she’s a very interesting person overall.
To me, she’s the strongest part of The Girlfriend Experence’s otherwise maddeningly undercooked presentation, her performance naturalistic, enigmatic, and real enough to keep you wondering what’s really ticking in her mind, behind the facade she shapeshifts to fit her role for whoever she’s talking to, be it a client, a colleague, a journalist, or her boyfriend. The parts when the story deviates away from her character’s perspective, and shifts focus onto her boyfriend, are when the film is at its most tedious.

Adding to the tedium is Soderbergh’s disjointed, unwieldy, seemingly random structuring of the plot through his editing (operating under his “Mary Ann Bernard” editor’s pseudonym). It feels like there’s scant rhyme or reason for how or why the sequence of events is jumbled in such a haphazardly non-linear manner. It’s as if Soderbergh split-cut all the useable pieces of footage on his timeline, put on a blindfold, and just reassembled the clips into any old order, didn’t watch it back, but still clicked Export, and said to himself, “yeah, that’ll do, I guess.” It’s so bad, that the entire film ends on a scene that doesn’t feel like an ending with a point to make, but merely another scene of Grey’s character meeting with a client that could have been inserted anywhere in the film.
(The only thing about the scene I continue to think back on is how said client happens to be a Jewish pawnbroker, who tells a casually-undressing Grey that voting for John McCain over Barack Obama in the ’08 election is very important, because — quote — “The state of Israel must continue.” Considering the ongoing war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and murderous genocide Israel is committing against Palestine for all the world to see right now, and the toxic ideology of Zionism facing a public reckoning for its nationalist/colonialist nature being at odds with defenders’ claims that Israel is justified in perpetrating their mass killings, this moment in the film hits a lot different than it might’ve done upon its initial release, when the Israel-Palestine conflict was already a fraught enough topic as it was. What are we meant to take away from this scene? Was it a deliberate comment on Zionism in American politics? Was it something Soderbergh wrote ahead of time, or was it an improvised line that arose during filming? Was it meant to be thought about this much, or was it merely a throwaway moment of characterisation, depicted without any moral judgement from the film’s cold, observational distance? I guess it’s open to interpretation.)
Even weirder than that, there’s a frickin’ post-credits scene that’s equally as random and pointless, for reasons I cannot possibly discern.
Soderbergh’s filmmaking in this is so head-scratchingly amateurish at times. Not just with the perplexing editing, but also the sound mix is shockingly poor, with the dialogue inadequately recorded and unevenly levelled with the ambient sounds and occasional music. The only part with any liveliness to it is the late-film montage scored by the David Holmes song, ‘I Heard Wonders’, but evidently an early instrumental version that predates the song as I know it. Perhaps it’s because this montage is set during the boyfriend’s Las Vegas business trip, and this sojourn to Vegas reignites Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven spirit of fun, if only for a few minutes.
Plus, there’s one scene set in a bar at night, with a conversation taking place between the two primary characters, that isn’t even shot to keep focus on their faces! They’re in the foreground, but the only thing in focus is the background! AND THERE’S NO REASON FOR IT! And just when you think that maybe they don’t have a focus puller controlling the depth of field and stuff, the shot continues long enough that the focus does change to fixate on Grey’s face at the end of the scene! WHAT THE HELL WAS THE THINKING HERE?????

And again, the film is so clinical and emotionally removed from the events transpiring, which I’m sure has a point to it that’s in keeping with the themes of the film, but for me, it just makes the film supremely difficult to be engaged by. It can be as intellectual and stylish and avant garde as it wants, as if it’s attempting to elevate what slight material there is to work with, but it doesn’t make for a compelling filmic experience. Just… a Girlfriend Experience.

God, surely the anthology TV show adaptation has to be better than this, right…?

Second and Third Viewing:

“A lot of people think they can separate love from sex. And when they get into it, they’re intimidated, their emotions arise, they get jealous. With you guys, it’s simple.”

Observations from a couple of different extra ways of watching The Girlfriend Experience:

• Steven Soderbergh’s 72 Minute Alternate Cut:
This version is made 5 minutes shorter by Soderbergh simply excising the theatrical cut’s sporadic intrusions of the ugly camcorder footage vignettes, where the boyfriend is on a private jet with his business pals on the way to Vegas, and they’re explicitly discussing the loose themes of the film as a commentary on the plot’s progression. With their welcome omission, as well as this re-edit’s slightly more comprehensible structure, streamlined focus, and inclusion of previously absent moments that the theatrical cut could’ve benefitted from (namely the Glenn Kenny Q-tip scene, only alluded to in dialogue in the theatrical cut, but an actual visible scene in the alternate cut), this take on The Girlfriend Experience feels like the better of the two.
Unfortunately, it remains just as fundamentally superficial, half-baked, and boring no matter what, perhaps stemming from its quick-fire 2 week shooting schedule, its heavily improvised scriptless nature, and/or the fact that 80–85% of the time, Soderbergh went with the first take every time. And sure, a director of his calibre could pull that off better than a first-timer, but the fast and loose nature of the film’s making feels to its detriment. So in my opinion, neither cut provides some sort of lost masterpiece in the Soderbergh canon. I’d only recommend watching it if you’re a die-hard completionist of his filmography, or you’re simply curious to see if your opinion might differ from mine, which it very well could.

• Theatrical Cut with Steven Soderbergh and Sasha Grey audio commentary:
A free-flowing podcast-esque conversation between Grey and Soderbergh is infinitely more interesting than the film they’re talking over. Whether it’s Grey — who at the time of recording was only 21 years old(!), yet a seasoned pornography veteran all the same — talking about the (ahem) ins-and-outs of the adult film industry, and how the only audio commentary she did before this was the one for Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, or it’s Soderbergh discussing his methodology for the filming and editing, remarking on the influences from Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard while still expressing doubt over his ability to emulate that storytelling style as well as he wanted to, and asking genuinely fascinated questions of Grey about the differences she found between porn acting and dramatic acting, how she navigated the male-dominated culture of her then-primary industry, and the unlikely crossover their collaboration engendered between fans of his work, and fans of her work.
(To my chagrin, though, Soderbergh never gives a reason — neither artistic nor accidental — as to why that locked-off, one-take conversation scene in the bar is shot with the foregrounded characters completely out of focus, which still drives me nuts.)

And now, with my curiosity fully satiated, I never need to watch this movie again!

Originally published January 4th 2024 at https://jackandersonkeane.substack.com.