I have what I consider to be a reasonable expectation--for narrative movies, anyway--that a film with as short a runtime as 77 minutes should proceed apace, and in even fashion. I also have the expectation that a Steven Soderbergh film should be narratively compelling (or at least 13 kinds of fun) and wonderful to look at.
With The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh fulfills only the last of my expectations. Serving once again as his own cinematographer, he uses scope to showcase his customarily great sense of composition, particularly in service of a script that doesn't necessarily warrant a 2.35 aspect ratio. However, the film plods, and the idea behind the movie--namely, an actual porn actress starring in a low-budget indie movie by an esteemed director--is far more fascinating than the story it produces.
In chronologically scattered fashion, TGE tells the story of a woman (played by Sasha Grey) who balances a relationship with her boyfriend of 1 1/2 years with her professional life as a high-end call girl. Through this 77-minute smattering of scenes, the film asks us to piece together the chronology of her interactions with her clients, her boyfriend, and other assorted characters along the way. That is, if we still care about the chronology once we've seen how everything plays out.
Deliberately fragmented storytelling is certainly not a new strategy for Soderbergh. Unfortunately, it feels here only like an extension of his earlier work, as opposed to an innovative step toward something more. The disjointed scenes merely bring on an intellectual itch to sequence events in chronological order; emotionally, they provide only cold distance from those events. Don't misunderstand; it's not that the distance was a surprise. It's that the distance slowly and steadfastly empties me of any interest or curiosity in the unfolding story. By the time the movie seems to be asking for some genuine emotional engagement, I have none to give.
Add to this characters quite bereft of character, delivering lines that are simultaneously over-mannered and under-acted, chock full of very noticeably fabricated pauses, stammers, and repetitions. I am uncertain at whose feet I should lay blame for this awkwardness in the dialogue (the writers, the director, the actors, or all three), but for a film similar in tone and low-budget experimental sensibilities, Soderbergh's Bubble had some of the most realistic dialogue I've ever heard in a fiction film. In this respect, TGE feels positively amateurish by comparison.
TGE also seems to want to focus more on what lies behind this woman's mask of professional sexuality, which is of far less interest to me than wanting to see how the relationship with her boyfriend works. In whatever way this film was designed to provoke, the fact that I actively want to see more of the dynamic between these two people, who are all but vacant emotionally, is singularly frustrating to me. It is the sole way in which the film succeeds in provoking me.
Again, I feel like the idea of this movie--perhaps even Soderbergh's notion of day-to-day direction on the cheap-and-quick--was and is way more interesting than the process of engaging with the finished product. I remember reading an interview with Soderbergh not too long ago, in which he speculated on his future in filmmaking, saying, "I'm looking at the landscape and I'm thinking, 'Hmmm, I don't know.' A few more years maybe...(a)nd then the stuff that I'm interested in is only going to be of interest to me." As his new projects are announced, and certainly in the wake of TGE, I grow increasingly worried that his statement has become more prophecy than musing.
However, for a man who was my favorite working director for almost a decade, it is my fervent hope that TGE is a more isolated case than that. To that end, I plan to catch up with Soderbergh's recent work by watching (and subsequently writing about) Che and The Informant! over the next couple of weeks, both of which will hopefully be much more memorable than this creative misfire.
1 comment:
Jake-
I think where this viewing experience might have gone wrong is before it started, with your expectations. "I also have the expectation that a Steven Soderbergh film should be narratively compelling...." Well, there no doubt this isn't the case- but also that this isn't what SS was up to here. Detractors have long called him a cerebral director, and at times he is; what's less clear is why that should be a bad thing. GFE is certainly that, more even than Che, Schizopolis, or Full Frontal. I think the healthier approach to a film by someone so restlessly experimental is to approach each film with total openness. And what one finds here, I think, is the closest he has come to making an essay film.
Let's start with the structure:
"The disjointed scenes merely bring on an intellectual itch to sequence events in chronological order; emotionally, they provide only cold distance from those events." They do indeed; in this sense they function in a genuinely Brechtian fashion, encouraging an analytical stance toward the narrative, not one driven by emotional empathy or even curiosity. The ordering of scenes and the links between them function via intellectual association, not causality or psychology.
What SS is giving us here is a short meditation on artifice and exploitation conducted in a series of one-on-one dialogues demonstrating how people adopt masks in their various social roles in order to get something they want from the other. Almost every scene gives us variations on that dynamic (and highlighted by an insistence on foregrounding consumption: people buying Chelsea, Chelsea buying art, the constant scenes of eating and drinking), until the last section shows the consequences of this for Chelsea: the man she is willing to sacrifice everything for never shows up, her later confession of what happened to her with The Critic, all underlined as well as further exemplified in her dealings with The Journalist (you know you're deep in art film territory when most of the characters are known only as 'The ____'. Developing a viewer's'interest or curiosity in the unfolding story' is beside the point here. Given the subject of the film, then, you'd expect to see some play on the level of performance, and here surely casting the film with a porn star surrounded by real-life writers is the way SS has chosen to explore this, successfully or no (I say the former, you the latter, but can either of us doubt that if he wanted a more traditional performance style he'd have had no trouble casting it for that?). In the context of people very self-consciously acting roles (perhaps in a way that comments on pomo ideas about 'fragmented selves'?), surely it's to the point that what we get here are characters (not just their performers) "delivering lines that are simultaneously over-mannered and under-acted"?
The film may not be successful for you, but I think SS is still working hard to give us something new in this medium we love so much, and I think it deserves to be considered in terms of what is trying to do, and not what it not isn't; that is, tell us a compelling story. And I think it works better as an exploration of social role-playing than The Informant!, not least because as you say, this is one of his most purely gorgeous-looking films in years (and of course that takes us back to consumption...).
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