The Girlfriend Experience

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve finally included a bona fide film in the Fest.  I took in a solo viewing of The Girlfriend Experience (sounds a lot better than “watched a movie about a hooker alone in a theater”) this weekend.  It was good.  It stars Sasha Grey in her first non-pornographic film, which every review I’ve read has been quick to point out, and hey, I’m no better.  A cast of unknowns and other non-actors gives the film a very unmovie, almost voyeuristic feel.  I wasn’t watching a actors on a screen, it was as if I was paying these characters to allow me a chance to peer into their lives for an hour and a half, to assume a heightened degree of intimacy with all of these people that I wouldn’t normally get in real life.  

False familiarity is an ongoing theme here.  Ms. Grey’s character, Chelsea, stars as a very high-priced prostitute ($2000/hr) giving bankers, traders, and other Wall Street types “the girlfriend experience”.  Her live in boyfriend, Chris (played by New York magazine writer Chris Santos), is a physical trainer, and one might say he’s in the same trade- playing the gym buddy to men who pay handsomely for his time.

What gives this movie a decidedly unmovie feel is, as I said, its sense of voyeurism.  It does not strive, as other films (appropriately and inappropriately) do, to Make a Point.  It simply chronicles the lives than rotate around Chelsea and her work, and the ways that a business like hers can affect relationships, trust, and confidence, even with the most strictly pre-stated rules or guidelines.