UNLIMITED STREAMING
WITH PRIME VIDEO
TRY 30-DAY TRIAL
Home > Drama >

The Girlfriend Experience

The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

May. 22,2009
|
5.5
|
R
| Drama

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.

...

Watch Trailer

Cast

Similar titles

Reviews

subxerogravity
2009/05/22

If I had saw this movie when it first came out in 2009, I may think differently about it. It's interesting to me how outdated the movie feels. The story centers around a high price escort doing her job just after the finical crisis of 2007 and the 2008 election. The constant mentioning of these two events makes the conversations feel forced and not natural, which is strange considering the film came out a year after these events, events that we are still going through as I write this. The movie is cluttered and makes no sense. The editing style makes you need to watch it more than once to understand what is going on (I myself watched it twice). The only problem is, I did not find it entertaining enough to even sit through it once.Sasha Grey is not all she's cracked up to be. I've seen pron stars in mainstream movies act better. I've seen her act better in mainstream movies. I guess I should not be so harsh since this was her first mainstream event. It may have been a better idea if Soderbergh at least got better actors for his supporting cast, instead of the dry uninteresting folks that make up this one. A lot of the movie is just conversations and it looks like the actors were picked because of their grasp of the conversation topic, which was about money, rather than their capability to make this topic interesting to someone uninterested in the topic.The movie does feel like a beta test for what would become a string of movies Soderbergh would end up doing after this with the same style to it. Unless your that die hard of a Soderbergh fan I would watch every movie that came after the Girlfriend Experience instead.

More
dragokin
2009/05/23

Steven Soderbergh's docudramas are polarizing, although i have nothing against them. However, in The Girlfriend Experience it is unclear whether there is a message, criticism or was it just another artistic experiment.Sasha Grey is surprisingly good, if you bear in mind her previous experience in front of the camera, but the scenario was to weak, in my opinion. We follow Sasha Grey's character as she earns her daily bread as a high-class prostitute.It is a shady world she lives in, yet everything was filmed in such a matter-of-fact manner that i felt neither revulsion nor pity. It was unclear why should a girl such as the main protagonist choose such vocation, which, according to this film, feels like just another line of work.Again, The Girlfriend Experience is almost a documentary, which eventually left me wondering why i'm watching it, at all...

More
HuntinPeck80
2009/05/24

The Girlfriend Experience is almost fascinatingly awful. Not a case of 'so bad it's good', but one to chew over, to list just how many different shades of empty it featured. And then forget it forever, or until you enrol for BA Media, Social Networks and Comms at the University of Inanity.At one and the same moment, it is and is not about the financial meltdown, is and is not about commerce, about the Big Apple. It's definitely not about the 'big O'. As far as I could see, desire was not one of the themes being explored. Curious omission, wouldn't you agree.The director and his 'breakthrough' star seem determined to carry her as far from her hardcore persona as they can; in short, by making her behaviour seem fairly normal, or more accurately, how might your everyday young woman with no acting experience respond to the task of playing the role of an escort? This is why I referred to 'assisted reality': reality being the context for banal dialogue. Tedious conversation, of which this film is bursting.Sasha Grey, unsurprisingly, gives Chelsea no personality, no inner life. She listens to rich men monotone about money and their woes, her eyes glazed over, and later we hear her dispassionately relate what went on once they got back to the bedroom. Don't expect any kinky scenes and don't look forward to the sort of demented energy she habitually put into her xxx scenes. Her character, Chelsea, is vapid and wholly unbelievable as a super high class hooker, much less as someone's actual girlfriend. The man playing her boyfriend puts more energy into his performance but it is still devoid of interest.The trouble is, this isn't a documentary, an analysis of venality or the greed is good culture, but nor is it a study of eroticism or desire. So when Chelsea speaks highly of her own skills as a seductress, we can't relate to it; when an unsatisfied client rubbishes her on the web, it's all too true.To sum up, the visual style is drab and wearying, the outbursts of music jarring and irrelevant. Nobody had their heart in this project. The film's emptiness would seem to reflect the emptiness of Sasha Grey in real life, often described as glacially detached, but written up as brainy and sophisticated by idiots basing their opinion solely on what goes on her 'likes' list.Maybe it says something about the world we've moved into. Hasn't Soderbergh retired now?

More
Moushou
2009/05/25

If you like me, did not notice the director before watching this you will have a much fairer opinion of this garbage.The life of a high class NY escort is presented in past/present cuts which trick you into thinking there is some suspense - this is a huge flaw and I would have certainly given it a higher rating than 1/10 if the film was not so.For someone who earns upwards of 1000$ a night you'd think she would be a good judge of character, or at the very least she would be able to spot someone who is trying to "use" her, well you would be wrong to think that, that particular part of the movie is so bad, that if this were a real call girl, you could pay her with candy corn to sleep with her and she would still give you change back.There are random shots of the streets of NY as if this were a documentary of some sort, they feel so out of place that you're left wondering why they're there, it clearly isn't a documentary.To completely bore you, the movie has a strong political presence too, discussing the upcoming election - all this does is make it feel outdated regardless of when you watch it. Again totally unnecessary, if you really needed to show people worrying about money couldn't you just give them a bad habit Stephen? What on Earth possessed you to include boring dialogue about "the economy"? This is a shrimp cocktail dumped over spaghetti carbonara, except it's made by Gordon Ramsey, so some people are bound to like it even though it tastes awful.

More