Review: The Girlfriend Experience

RECOMMENDED

“I can see the end of my career,” Steven Soderbergh told a reporter for The Guardian, published July 14, shortly after the Brad Pitt-starring project “Moneyball” was cancelled three days before shooting was about to begin and millions had been spent. “I’ve had that sensation for a few years now. And so I’ve got a list of stuff that I want to do, that I hope I can do, and once that’s all finished I may just disappear.” What does that mean for his smaller recent projects, “Bubble” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” featured this week at Siskel, shot on HD with minimal cast and crew? If his Matt Damon comedy this fall, “The Informant!” doesn’t play well and his 3-D Cleopatra musical scored by Guided By Voices also gets the asp, would we see more movies like these? Or could he simply disappear? The improvisation methods of “TGE” lead in several interesting directions, as real-life sexual performer Sasha Grey plays a high-end call girl in modern-day Manhattan, performing opaquely, a dead-eyed analogue to Godard’s 1960s roles with bright-eyed, sad-eyed women as prostitutes? Soderbergh’s post-Godard profession landed coincidentally in the October 2008 money meltdown. The prostitute meets clueless men, from a personal-trainer boyfriend to a real-life magazine journalist to money-fretting clients to a critic (played with oleaginous ardor by film critic Glenn Kenny). The light is cold yet lucent. The framing is gorgeous yet obtuse. The story is elliptical. The ending is baffling. Yet increasingly questions of professional authenticity resound, as much as those of distanced emotions ever have, in Soderbergh’s later work. (Ray Pride)