The Girlfriend Experience
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Year Released: 2009
Rating: 2.0
Soderbergh does this every once in a while: a low-tech, 'low-budget' technical experiment to distract himself from his high-tech, high-budget theatrical clunkers. Here, a high-class prostitute (Sasha Grey, oddly more verbal in her pornographic pictures) juggles her boyfriend and her career, devoting a lot of time to buying expensive clothes and keeping her fickle clientele satisfied - when she grows attached to one john on the basis of a phone conversation (!?), she's too quick to ditch the boyfriend. It's resoundingly shallow - the script struggles to tie the idea of paying for pleasure with the current economic crisis (Grey's "dates" complain about losing money but are quick to pay her a handsome sum) - and Soderbergh's self-conscious narrative dicing isn't much of a cover.
