I finished watching The Girlfriend Experience last night, and I’ve got to say I think it’s one of the more underrated films of 2009. The acting, admittedly, is not the best, but still there’s something honest and true about the performances anyway, as bad as they may be. You get the sense that you’re watching real people working out their grievances and issues in a historical moment where oftentimes genuine and lasting connection with others seems fleeting, at best. For me, at least, it’s not a film about call girls or sex work, but about the relationship between money and intimacy in our day and age.
Like A.O. Scott of the New York Times, I think it’s a film that may best be viewed, and appreciated, ten years hence. From the last paragraph of his review:
Mr. Soderbergh, like Jean-Luc Godard in the second half of the 1960s, is less concerned here with finish or coherence than with an authentic, on-the-fly recording of a moment, and right now that moment — the weeks just before the last presidential election, when the financial system was in midcalamity — is at once too close and too emphatically in the past for it to make a lot of sense. But when the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the 10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around, this strange, numb cinematic experience may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.
There’s a comparison, I think, to be made with the more recent film, Up in the Air, featuring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. Here’s A.O. Scott again, this time on the Charlie Rose Show, dated 12/16/09:
I think that [Up in the Air] accomplishes something very, very difficult, which is it deals with these very grave and troubling and anxious matters with a consistently light touch. I haven’t seen that done quite as well since Preston Sturges or Frank Capra. I think Up in the Air, I’ll say it here, is in a way the classic movie of our moment that just gets at something about American life right now. It goes down very easy, but it’s a very bitter pill.
For a comparison of the two films, check out blogger Corey Chambliss’s take at Movie Cultists.
