Sep. 23, 2009 - Issue #727: Inside Books 2009

DVD Detective

Genuine emotions

The Girlfriend Experience dabbles in ambiguous emotion while Goodbye Solo tries to force the feeling

I'm willing to give Steven Soderbergh an awful lot of room when it comes to creative choice. Though it would be a stretch to say I like all of his films, his willingness to experiment and, especially, to jump around genres and production methods, subverting his own style to the most effective way to tell the story without ever devolving into rote hackery—a rare trait among filmmakers; probably the only other modern filmmaker comparable to Soderbergh in this regard is UK filmmaker Michael Winterbottom—gives him a wide berth in my books.

So I'll refrain from calling the casting of porn star Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience stunt casting. Given the obvious parallels between porn and high-class prostitution, where Grey's Chelsea (working name)/Christine (real name) makes her living, it makes sense, and does give the film a layer of, if not strict verisimilitude, at least a curious blurring of reality. In interviews for the film, Grey was careful to distance herself and her day job from the character she's portraying, but knowing her background, it's impossible not to speculate on the connections, and though the casting of porn stars is not entirely unheard of in mainstream productions, it's incredibly rare that the essential dilemma of their personal lives—essentially, fake love (indulge my stretching of that term) against sincere love—is explored so plainly, even if it's at best allegorical in this case.

Nevertheless, it says something about Grey's performance and the somewhat experimental, composed aimlessness of The Girlfriend Experience's story that the most interesting thing about the film is wondering about its real-life parallels. A chronologically distorted character sketch, Experience follows Chelsea/Christine alternately providing clients with her eponymous service—basically a full date and some tenderness to go with the sex—interacting with her personal trainer boyfriend, possibly falling in love with a client, submitting to a sleazy online review and being interviewed by a journalist.

There are certainly some interesting ideas occasionally played with here—the way both Christine and her boyfriend worry about their freelance businesses is an interesting suggestion of how just about anything can be a routine day at the office, as it were—but the film falls down on Grey's performance: it's too hard to tell if her affectlessness is portrayed or just inescapable, whether she's acting or is just a bad actress. The few scenes where we get a glimpse of her facade fading suggest its the latter, although I'm willing to give points to Soderbergh for muddying the issue well enough that it becomes another question about just how close to emotional reality this story is.

Speaking of which, though independent filmmaker Ramin Bahrani gets credit for being a social realist, emotional realism with social overtones might be a better way of describing him. Bahrani is a filmmaker devoted to the underside of America, especially the on-the-margins way immigrants strive for the American dream, explored again here in Goodbye Solo, the story of a cab driver, Solo, and a seemingly suicidal man, William, striking up an unlikely friendship. What separates him from—and, in my minority opinion, seriously hamstrings him when compared to—someone like Ken Loach or David Simon is a bent towards treacle and not necessarily extending his penchant for reality to the realms of believability.

For instance, In his first feature, Man Push Cart, the Pakistani immigrant food cart operator who Bahrani follows wasn't just, say, a doctor or a lawyer who's in a new life. No, he was a rock star who followed his wife to America. His wife then died in a car crash. I realize such a situation is theoretically possible, but I find Bahrani's attempts to make his stories so powerfully, undeniably sentimentally gripping sell his social goals short, essentially just putting an immigrant facade on what are at their core films every bit as emotionally manipulative and morally simplistic as Hollywood fare.

Though it does have its quiet, powerful moments, especially a solemn stare-down between his two leads towards the end, this is just a little too much of a liberal fantasy to convince me that what I'm watching is how real people act. Do sincerely suicidal people—i.e. not attention-seeking teenage girls—blatantly telegraph their intentions to relative strangers? Do they begrudgingly let cabbies crash on their motel room couch? Sure, the actual interaction between Solo and William is occasionally what you might call heartwarming, but it seems like Bahrani is so intent on celebrating the human spirit he sort of forgets that people need to be human, too. The Girlfriend Experience may suffer for lacking emotion, but at least it's not trying to beat them out of you. V
 

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