Maybe it’s a sign of the times that porn-stars are churning out interesting performances in movies nowadays. I say this without sarcasm and with the understanding of porn’s enduring relevance as either aid or ill, depending on who’s watching, of course. But with the collective certainty about such uncertain times, the bared necessity of XXX film fatale Sasha Grey in Stephen Soderbergh’s latest film The Girlfriend Experience shouldn’t be all that surprising.
For a girl who, barely an adult at 18, slipped comfortably into the vocation of adult film star — Grey beginning her direct-to-jerk-off-video career in 2006 with such appropriately inappropriate fare as Teenage Anal Princesses 5 to smut staple-hood in the more recent Sasha Grey’s Anatomy — playing the young call girl of Experience isn’t too much of a stretch. That Academy Award-winning Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, the Ocean’s trilogy) called for a lot of improv in this cinema-verite vehicle is spot-on considering Grey’s self-possession as Manhattan escort Chelsea is as apparent as the vamp-toned makeup she is rarely seen without. The business-as-usual stoicism of someone who’s got more than 150 porn flicks under her name is no different from that of a sexual wunderkind who’s got a thick black book of cash-flush clients filled to the very last page.
When Screwed, Screw
“I met with Phillip on October 5th and 6th. I wore a Michael Kors dress and shoes and La Perla lingerie underneath,” Chelsea blandly recounts at the outset of the film, the details of her dalliances — movie, drinks at an upscale hotel bar, an hour of sex — described like a supermarket cashier would the canned goods she’d just scanned. Just another day, another transaction typed up in her computer log. Even as she exits her john’s lobby with the little black dress she’d worn the night before, wraparound shades, and her hair up — a less-charmed Holly Golightly strolling by Tiffany’s — you can tell she’s used to the exits before sunrise, the dimmed lights of a hotel bedroom, and the chilly mornings of her occupation.
It’s no coincidence that the New York Chelsea traipses through and that the audience views throughout the film is tinted in drabness. We’re escorted through a few weeks of the girl’s life in October of 2008, when America the Brave is on its way to losing its economic libido. The mood is expressed by some of our protagonist’s clients (most, unsurprisingly, work on Wall Street). The pleasure one man seeks from her is more consolatory conversation than gratuitous sex after his architectural firm loses a contract. Yet most men dull their professional pains by commissioning her for the sexual healing she’s known to give. Phillip, the first man we encounter, explains the government bailout (a.k.a. the stimulus package) to her over a post-one-nighter breakfast. “The economy is f*cked, my business is f*cked — I’m making like a tenth of what I made two years ago,” gripes another client right before he leads her into the sack.
Sexual Economy
As a $2,000 orifice (an ear and, well, whatever else) to her clients, the jizz biz looks like it’s booming and Chelsea seems to be on top of things. Not so much for her live-in boyfriend Chris, a personal trainer who, like the other men in her life, is feeling the financial strain. There is glaring complexity in their relationship: a woman who uses sex as power coupled with a man trying to cope with his manhood — trying to bring the bacon to their plush apartment that’s likely funded by his girlfriend, to be a man to a woman who obviously wears the pants over the lace panties. “I didn’t think you’d approve of that,” Chris tells Chelsea on why he turned down a boys’ trip out to Vegas (when the chips are down, buy more, supposedly) for “self-medication.”
Eventually, we witness Chris’ decision to head to Sin City after Chelsea, in not so many words, says she’s dating a client based on personalogy (“It’s not astrology!” she protests.) It’s an indication that, like her pricey outfits and blank expression, stability is just another veneer of hers. And so the jumble of scenes and dialogue Soderbergh has prepared for us — business meets, “intrusive” questions from a journalist trying to find the “chink in her armor,” discussing her romantic attachment to a client over lunch with a girlfriend — represent the actual, albeit sleek, clutter in Chelsea’s life.
“All women, ultimately, are evil... they have all the f*cking power and they know this,” Chris’s buddy tells him in Vegas. But then the chinks we soon spot in Chelsea’s armor will dispute this claim: Chelsea tearing up after a sex blogger tries to extort a freebie off of her for a good review and when the personalogy match she ditches her boyfriend for does the same to her in the end. While her livelihood runs on sex as therapy, the therapy she uses for her own crisis — relying on personalogy, star signs, whatever for love — is just as flawed as the service she renders to clients.
Soderbergh is no stranger to these sorts of grand statements hovering over such shady subject matter, what with Sex, Lies and Videotape and Traffic thrown in with his Clooney blockbusters. But really, drugs, sex, and sex tapes fit in nicely with a recession that coincides with a downturn in morals (the reasons for such vary, depending on what you’re watching). Which is why the existence of HBO’s new series Cathouse (on the workers in a Nevada brothel) and Hung (on a poor but well-packaged schmuck turning to man-whoring as a last resort) is timely. ‘Cause while everyone’s wondering how things will turn out with the world in a year or two, the vice, escape, or whatever personal therapy you rely on will be a little more attractive than sucking it up and facing problems head-on. Better for a porn star to tell us the story of our lives, I guess.