Steven Soderbergh means success. From Erin Brockovich to Ocean's Eleven, Soderbergh has proved time and again that he has the chops to make successful big-budget films that bring in audiences, and, in turn, bring in money for the studios. And then there are the smaller films such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which established Soderbergh as a very particular kind of director, one who sees the darker world around us, the subtext that lingers just beneath the surface of our day to day lives.

The director's most recent art-house fare such as Bubble or Che have not performed well at the box office, but as the film experiments that they are, work The question now is what sort of film will The Girlfriend Experience be?

The Girlfriend Experience follows a high-class escort (Sasha Grey) as she provides rich men with not only sexual services but also love, attention, and well, the full "girlfriend" experience. Ardent admirers of Soderbergh's work will have to wait until May to find out if there's some sort of ulterior plot, or if it's really more of an intense exploration of that lifestyle, with all the work-a-day problems that this escort encounters as she navigates having a boyfriend, having clients, and how she finds her way in the world of October 2008.

Soderbergh's films frequently deal with love, sex, and the complications that arise from each, and The Girlfriend Experience looks to be a more open examination of those themes. That the main actress Sasha Grey happens to be a real-life "adult film" star is an interesting twist, and the entire film seems the perfect provocative experiment as we watch a woman who, in real life, is regularly paid to have sex on screen becomes an actress portraying a woman who has sex for pay.

The trailer finds Sasha Grey drifting docile through her existence, as we are introduced to her character's life through a series of title cards informing us of her age, her boyfriend's job, and several other bits of information.

If the film itself adheres to the dreamlike state that the trailer promises, we may find ourselves with a very different sort of film than has been made in recent years. Early reports indicate that the non-linear narrative and editing rivals that of Memento, but the final cut has yet to be screened, and many changes could be made between January's Sundance screening, and the May official release date.

All signs seem to indicate that The Girlfriend Experience will be an art house film. Soderbergh himself announced that he shot the film in 16 days, on a shoestring budget of 1.7 million, largely improvised, and on the RED camera. The RED has been turning heads in the last year as a lightweight camera that shoots high-definition and gorgeous footage, and early reports from those who attended the Sundance screening indicate that the RED served Soderbergh's purposes well, allowing him to capture the semi-spontaneous nature of the film, as well as those tiny moments that can't be planned for, or replicated.

In short, this sort of film is exactly where Soderbergh seems to excel: A small-scale subject with characters that can be fully fleshed out and enjoyed, and a wealth of interesting technical film work all support his experimental style. As a true visual artist, Soderbergh's medium happens to be film, and while he may work on larger projects they all bear trace elements and subtle nods to this underlying but prominent side of him. As a director who doesn't feel he has to rely on producing only one sort of film, Soderbergh's work history shows that he enjoys himself no matter what the medium.

Though his films tend to lack the single-minded focus of Guy Maddin or the illustrious artistry of Terrence Malick, the fact remains that Soderbergh is an undeniably strong voice in American cinema today, whether through strong and dissonant films such as Traffic, or the quiet brushstrokes of a piece like The Girlfriend Experience. What might make this film great, in our current bleak economic climate, would be if it focused in on the idea that someone would pay not only for sex, but for intimacy and comfort from the harsh realities of the world. Fortunes may swell and falter, pandemic flu and natural disaster fears may grip our country, but we are all still seeking to know and to be loved, even at an hourly rate.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us