I Saw "The Girlfriend Experience"

Last weekend, I watched "The Girlfriend Experience," and, I'm surprised to say, I loved it. Really loved it. I'd read a lot of negative reviews and heard from people I knew who had seen it that it was cold and remote and not so good, but I thought it was glorious.

First and foremost, I loved that it was terrifically beautiful. Here is an audio slideshow in which Soderbergh talks about using almost solely available light, and I love that. It's so lush and painterly. Just exquisite. It reminded me a bit, not literally but impressionistically, of the "Punch-Drunk Love" title sequence, created by the late Jeremy Blake. I suppose a lot of what I'm after, when I write about the sex industries, is trying to capture some of the desperate beauty in it, and I loved that Soderbergh did that.

I thought Sasha Grey was pretty great. She got called out for being cold or distant or impossible to read by various critics, but I agreed and didn't agree. One: Of course she is; that's how many sex workers are. Two: Simultaneously, of course she's not; she's only that on the surface. I don't know if it was me projecting based on my own experiences with sex workers, but I thought she did that, inadvertently or intentionally: revealed the sort of walking contradiction of sex work: that you are often totally there and very hidden. What appears to be invisible on the inside--if you look closer, is intensely complex beneath the surface. So, she worked for me.

The depiction of the men was the movie's greatest strength, and I loved that Soderbergh saw in them a kind of piteous grace. I feel the same way, often, when encountering these men. They are sad, desperate, lonely, busy, powerful, complicated. They aren't simply marks or fools or clowns. He got that sometimes the ridiculousness of man is a thing at which to wonder. I loved the scene with the orthodox Jew (I think?) in the jewelry shop. And film critic Glenn Kenny as the lecherous erotic site reviewer was appallingly spot on; I have known men like him.

I think the thing I liked most about the movie was that, at least to me, it was oftentimes deeply, quietly humorous. And I thought that was really true. You can get all complicated and poignant and insightful about sex work, but there's something totally, completely, irrationally hilarious about it. Sex work, in a way, is patently insane, in part because only men would be ridiculous enough to pay for sex. That's sex work's one true thing. Or, hey, you know, maybe that's just me.