(directed by Steven Soderbergh, 2009)

Let's start with Sasha Grey. Most rats have more inflective personality than a large chunk of humanity; that being said, the most intrigue and expression doesn't typically exude from the likes of generic club-hopping twenty-somethings as a whole...nor does it necessarily exist from the get-go in a very young porn 'star,' the attributes of which I'd venture are not only not bright but lack real purpose in life and its many overt emanations.

I'm not reviewing her 'adult' films, which albeit I find regularly juvenile in an ironic twist of so-called maturity. So I don't really care what she does in erotic compendium; I'm keen on the very sane reason Steven Soderbergh made her a parallel muse.

The Girlfriend Experience smarts of nothing of the sort, lives and dies in piecemeal documentary style, out of emotional semblance as much as chronological order, and almost alphabetizes the greedy, detached, curious stupidity of the next wave of celebrated personalities. A remarkable, painfully trite and abrasively honest pictorial, conversational spatter, the film delicately resonates in spite of its desperately shallow appeal. Not so much a real striptease of truth in the sex industry, it does dabble lightly in the theory of what it is to be 'young'...or be Grey, to whom the film very obviously self-refers.

The problem with its slow, distally candid, tooling banter is how unbelievably unattached the entire world is...one small piece of it, anyway...electing to discard, degrade and disintegrate not just fiction, but the ability to maintain wanted sympathy. While a plethora of milder, youthful follies of my own invokepathological empathy, as a viewer, my willingness to commit to Grey's character's guts is apathetic at best.

At worst, as concerns the entire film, I am tragically unimpressed. Not with the lightweight cinematic velocity, which is actually the work's most interesting feature, but rather in the humanistic disappointment that the characters in this portrait evoke. For varying reasons, they are all somewhat lonely, or alone, and some seem well to deserve it.

Christine Brown is a nobody; her boyfriend, Chris, is also no one to anyone in any immediate emotional capacity. Both, by virtue of mundane model good-looks, have picked easy career paths, and at least for the short-term, though by contrasting methods, have secured independence in and from their own spheres. Christine wants to be listened to, as herself or as pseudo-sophisticate Chelsea, but ultimately has very little to nothing to say. Chris is much more the talker and has ineffably more heart, but is just as confounded by his own lack of lumbar in the face of needing equally to be heard. He is not quite the pushover but is eager to please, his effort to maintain individuality very mild but distinctly flawed to those around him. No one wants Chris for Chris, as no one genuinely wants Christine for someone other than Chelsea; their only value, somewhat sadly self-constructed, lies quite strictly in their youth and naivety.

The irony of Chelsea is that same ingenuity, as transparent in her persona as that of rival escort Tara. In Tara's two on-screen honorable mentions, her superficial effervescence disruptively outshines icy, mousy little Chelsea, who calls the redhead a 'hobbyist'...but to whom she loses business. The two girls, like realistic droves of others, are partly empty-headed fuck-dolls, playing nemesis roles in a niche that both like to believe they control. However vain and ignoble, or meritorious the profession, the insecurity and dimwitted ease of manipulation by predatory male 'aids' are still banes of a young woman's total success. Tara and Chelsea, whether by subtle or rather glaring devices, find a status of individual fixtures in what is yet a male-ordered exhibit...the men in the lead having perhaps less in hand but experience aplenty at getting exactly what they want. The girls are just learning how to do so, keeping competitive distance from themselves and each other, effectively alienating what 'power' weaker or younger men tend mistakenly to allot them.

To this review, the johns and seedy behind-the-sceners are insignificant masculine milquetoast, though to the film they are everything but. Some upstanding but emotionally disreputable, others flat-out ill-bred, they are much more the meat ofThe Girlfriend Experience than the girlfriends themselves.

Comprehensively a slow and digestible movie, I don't believe that this film showcases anything related to so much as talent, and is thus truthful in appointing its mark. It does not spank of genius, but is artistic in its poignancy and thoughtful scenarios, its illumined perspective and self-centered, unfulfilled apathy. Worth seeing and even more worth forgetting, The Girlfriend Experience is neither easily dismissed nor a factorial masterpiece. What it gives is directly proportional to what it expects in return.