The Girlfriend Experience - Edinburgh International Film Festival review

In 1966 Jean Luc Godard made Two or Three Things I Know About Her, a film about a Parisian housewife who prostituted herself in order to enjoy the fruits of consumer capitalism. Appearing on television to promote the film and further explain its message, that capitalism = prostitution, Godard would be accompanied by an actual prostitute.

I mention this by way of introduction not because of some desire to show off my knowledge of cinema – Two or Three Things is a hardly obscure – but because I think it provides something of a model for The Girlfriend Experience, as another film about capitalism and exploitation in its diegesis and in terms of the relationship between its two major players.

The first is director Steven Soderbergh, who has managed to accomplish in the 1990s and 2000s to do what Francis Ford Coppola had hoped he and his movie brat colleagues would in the 1970s, namely alternate between mainstream and personal projects.

The problem with more personal projects is, of course, precisely that: how to find an audience for a more experimental project, lacking big name stars, when you don’t have the resources of the Hollywood machine at your disposal.

This is where the second player, self-styled existential porn star cum performance artist Sasha Grey / Marina Ann Hantzis comes into the equation.

For she gives Soderbergh the necessary hook to hang The Girlfriend Experience upon, whilst in turn benefitting from the exposure it gives her as she aspires to move outside the porn demi-monde as into more legitimate realms.

Both, that is, are symbiotically exploiting one another. Both are also exploiting the audience. But this is to be expected – what film doesn’t, at some level, exploit our desires?

A problem, for me, the way in which The Girlfriend Experience fails as art, is that it is too calculated. Grey plays not a housewife like Marina Vlady in Two or Three Things but a high-class Manhattan call girl, Chelsea/Christine, whose clientele are Wall Street brokers, with the whole thing being set over an indeterminate, but brief, period around the run up to the US treasury bailout and the presidential elections last year. The issue is that in US cinema hookers are invariably crack whores or career women. As Samuel Goldwyn said, “we need some new clichés”.

Another, as Godard’s film also shows, is that it’s all been done before, and far better. There’s nothing particularly radical about what Soderbergh is doing here. Besides Godard, we can consider movie brat Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Body Double, the former featuring Nancy Allen as a similar call girl, and the latter originally casting porn performer Annette Haven in the role eventually filled by Melanie Griffiths.

Nor am I convinced by the radicalism of what Grey does in her ‘own’ porn films. Note the bracketing of ‘own’. The producers of Anal Cavity Search 3 or Grand Theft Anal 11, and the vast majority of their consumers, do not care about Grey’s philosophy, they just want to make money off her and jerk-off to her respectively.

Basically, it’s hard to talk philosophy when you’re deep-throating someone. And while Grey can be applauded for her willingness to do so-called ‘interracial’ porn, these selfsame films surely reinforce racist stereotypes, fantasies and fetishisation rather than challenge them. This is also something which can be said of her appearances in so-called ‘lesbian’ porn, invariably addressed as it is to the male heterosexual spectator.

Then there is the issue of residual payments, something which porn performers, as workers for hire (like most of us under capitalism), do not receive. Though Grey has mentioned these – and that she is will get them from The Girlfriend Experience – there is little doubt in my mind that if she were to push the question with the porn producers and insist upon them she would quickly be persona non grata.

Porn producers are certainly happy to see someone move into the mainstream for the legitimation it helps provide their industry but not if that person then begins to question the legitimacy of their own business practices. (Not, of course, that Hollywood is unfamiliar with being adept as screwing its own talent over; yes, I do have an essentially sadomasochistic view of the universe whereby you are either one of those doing the fucking or one of those being fucked.)

The issue may be that Soderbergh’s film does not entirely provide the showcase Grey wants. Though she demonstrates that she has some acting ability, Soderbergh remains more interested in technique and technology, much of it alienating. There are almost no medium close-up or two-shots in which Grey and another performer are there actually acting and reacting to one another. Instead, we tend to get shot-reverse shot patterns – albeit as likely to focusing on the one who is listening than speaking – sides of mobile phone conversations; voice-off monologues, and figures either in shadow, behind objects or in soft focus. The actors, that is, are as often as not reduced to figural elements as those around which the film revolves, while much of the ‘experience’ looks to have been constructed in the editing and post-production.

The key thing which needs to be emphasised is that the film is not sexually explicit. There are a few seconds of naturalistic nudity but there is no actual sexual activity seen, with the result a safe R rating .

Having someone used to performing sexually on camera, I wish Soderbergh had taken the chance to bring the porn film out of its ghetto, to complete the work begun by Radley Metzger in the 1970s but left uncompleted with the rise of home video in the 1980s and of gonzo porn in the 1990s. (Tellingly, Metzger’s The Opening of Misty Beethoven, an imaginative retelling of Pygmalion, is the only porn film referenced within The Girlfriend Experience, via a modern-day Al Goldstein’s savage critique of Chelsea’s non-performance for him.)

In my ideal version, everything that is in there already would be retained, but would have been punctuated by alienating, deliberately non-eroticised scenes of Chelsea involved in actual sex work. He would have then fought a campaign against the MPAA and their undoubted refusal to certificate the film, won, and would then have released the film on DVD without any chapter stops or ability for the consumer only interested in porn to go straight to the action. He might then have directed a porn film with Grey whose soundtrack consisted of Grey – who asserts to be a fan of Godard, Breillat and other high-brow art cinema figures – reading excerpts from Histoire(s) du cinema or expounding her own personal philosophy, again without the opportunity for the consumer to fast forward or – if it were possible – turn the sound down.

Somehow, however, I don’t think such hybridisations it’s going to happen. There are too many vested interests for it to be otherwise, in both porn and mainstream cinemas.

Action

Directed by Tinto Brass in the wake of the Caligula debacle and prior to his reinvention as a purveyor of sophisticated erotica, Action comes across in the main as something of a throwback to his more pop / avant-garde films of the 1960s such as Yankee and Cul cuore in gola.

The main difference, however, is that whereas those films engaged with genre and filone cinema in the form of the Italian style western and thriller, Action seems more of an attempt to respond to the such art films of the time as Bertolucci's Partner, Godard's Weekend and Pasolini's Uccellacci e uccellini, infused with a touch of 1970s punk spirit reminiscent – if almost certainly not consciously derived from – Jarman's Jubilee.


Anarchy in the UK

As such, the results are something of a deliberate mess, albeit an intermittently entertaining and provocative one.

Luc Merenda plays Bruno Martel, an idealistic young actor working on a curious looking gangster movie – curious insofar as he dresses and acts like an American gangster whilst the cops pursuing him are London bobbies – who walks off the set and goes wandering through the literal and metaphorical wasteland, searching for existential meaning.

In the course of this ballade or bildungsroman – choose your frame of reference – he encounters Garibaldi; his co-star Doris and her double Ofelia; a group of menacing punks; the inhabitants of a Snake Pit style madhouse; witnesses his co-star being forced to defecate on cue and on camera; and, possibly most memorable of all as an image, a decidedly surrealistic and oneiric group of formally attired men and women with penises and vaginas for noses and mouths respectively.




Brass's genital faced figures


Rene Magritte's Le Viol




Two of the Chapman Brothers' figures

The presence of Adriana Asti references another likely source of inspiration in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty – and thus, perhaps, a further vague justification / rationale for the sadistic defecation scene, given its memorable vignette where defectation is public and eating is private – whilst genre fans will delight in John Steiner's appearance as Merenda's manager and the casting of Suspiria's Susanna Javicoli as Doris / Ofelia.

That the viewer must endeavour to tease out such meanings is, of course, the whole crux of how he or she is likely responds to Action beyond simple knee jerk reactions that it is misogynistic or tasteless, as the feminist and bourgeois responses respectively.

Is it just bad?

Is it only bad by the selfsame conventional standards Brass wants his audience to (re-)(re-)re-examine?

Is it a bad example of its particular type of filmmaking, inasmuch as it seems to have little that is particularly insightful or original to actually say?

And then, if the last of these – not entirely incommensurable – possibilities is the case, could this potentially be the point, as a joke targeted at contemporary avant-garde types?

The Great and the Good #2

Argento's director of photography on the much-maligned The Phantom of the Opera, Ronnie Taylor, indicated that the director gave him a book of Georges de la Tour's paintings for visual inspiration and that, in addition to influencing the look of the film in general through mirrored compositions, candle lights and chiaroscuro, he also worked in some specific references to the artist's Madeline deux flammes.

de la Tour's painting:



Some of Taylor and Argento's images:







This sequence plays, I think, much like a vivant version of the painting.



The masculin deux flammes?



The madeline quartre flammes?

The film as a whole, meanwhile, is replete with references to its artistic milieux - the production of Gounod's Faust, as found in Leroux's novel; the dandies at the bathhouse arguing about the relative merits of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, or the presence of Degas painting the demi-monde.



The artist at work, seen in the mirror...



... and perhaps producing something like La Classe de Danse?

In line with the film's setting, it's also worth noting how the Heath-Robinson type machine devised by the ratcatcher is, as Jean-Baptiste Thoret notes, similar to the Rocket in Melies's Voyage de la lune





Argento and Melies - deux magiciens?

The difficulty as far as making the case for Argento as a serious auteur / auteur worthy of serious consideration is concerned, however, is perhaps that these quotations and references may come across as a pleading to be taken as such and thereby backfire as too-self-conscious demonstrations of cultural capital and taste that are then labelled as kitsch by the critic who feels uncomfortable with the more popular / populist / commercial aspects of the cinema.