The Girlfriend Experience

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (2009) - July 9, 2009
An aggressively dull film about the daily life of a high-class prostitute and her boyfriend, a personal trainer. The film doesn't contain even a hint of a plot, which isn't necessarily a problem, as Soderbergh is clearly going for a really low-key character study sort of vibe. The only problem is that the prostitute, her stupid boyfriend and all of the clients are not interesting in the least as characters. The dialogue, which is clearly mostly improvised, sounds authentic enough -- it consists almost entirely of the type of small-talk and random chit-chat that you tend to engage in with people you don't really know -- but it isn't even remotely interesting to listen to. Soderbergh has also assembled the film in a seemingly arbitrary non-linear fashion, which really only serves to heighten the "look how avant-garde I'm being!!!" factor. I guess I can see what Soderbergh was going for here, and maybe he even succeeded, but this film is just not for me. It felt like a succession of random scenes with no real cohesion, to the point where in the last half hour or so I honestly thought that each scene could be the last, and when it finally did end, it just felt arbitrary. Why that scene and not the one before it? Or the one before that? The movie looked very good, I will give it that; I definitely left the theatre with more respect for Steven Soderbergh the cinematographer, but less respect for Steven Soderbergh the storyteller. *1/2