She meets a variety of clients, including a French businessman, a Hassidic Jewish diamond dealer, and a married screenwriter. He knows what she does for a living and apparently accepts the situation. He has his own business issues, attempting to launch a clothing line and organize a more financially rewarding relationship with the health club where he works. In a sequence scattered throughout the film, Chris accompanies a wealthy client and his friends hedge fund managers on a hedonistic weekend in Las Vegas.
Christine projects herself as cool and collected, and entirely in command of every situation. The Girlfriend Experience takes place almost entirely in luxurious restaurants, hotels, shops and apartments. Christine keeps a detailed journal and records her liaisons, including the brand names of the clothes and shoes she wore, and her extensive purchases.
Soderbergh emphasizes the modern, gleaming, soulless surfaces. The film is accurate and attentive enough to convey the appalling emptiness of this world. Moreover, the filmmaker was fortunate in his timing. We see the nervousness on certain faces. There are references to recession, Depression, the bank bailout. Keep it in gold. The film is attractive to look at, shot on dense high definition video, in a fluid, semi-poetic style. The story is told in fragments out of chronological sequence.
The spectator is obliged to work at piecing them together. As criticism, however, if criticism this be, The Girlfriend Experience is ultimately timid and evasive. But that work is not done here. The character of Christine is deliberately constricted and largely blocked from view. Soderbergh makes the mistake of representing a superficial, self-centered social circle in a minimalist, deadpan fashion.
The two negatives do not add up to a positive. Is that the case? Does the Madoff affair, for example, offer no material for tragedy? Or the failure of large institutions, or the fate of countless innocent and not-so-innocent individuals, including those involved in the sex trade, somehow caught up in the financial bubble and its bursting?
