Flutterby™! : The Girlfriend Experience

It was a busy weekend. Charlene's last day with kids was Thursday, and last day of school was Friday. so this weekend was a break in routine. I was expecting that she'd be gone all Saturday, so I'd planned a killer bike ride, but I was feeling like hell on Friday evening and canceled. We spent Saturday cleaning and organizing, Charlene went off to her event in the late afternoon while I did more house stuff. Then yesterday we took as a day of just hanging out. Spent some time in the morning lying on the grass in the back yard, and went down to San Rafael to wander around the Italian Street Painting Festival, hung out listening to Frobeck and the Banda Italiana di Marin performance in the church, and while we were there noticed that The Girlfriend Experience was playing at The Rafael. So with a little shuffling of the schedule of some guests arriving late last night we went to see the 8:55 showing.

As the credits rolled at the end the guy behind us got up and proclaimed his disappointment in a loud voice. I understand where he's coming from, if you haven't been privy to the subtleties of life around our household that previous paragraph reads as something like "same old same old", and The Girlfriend Experience was all about the subtleties of what wasn't there.

You've read the summaries at this point: Chelsea, played by Sasha Grey, who's best known for her work in porn (as Roger Ebert amusingly referenced in his review, one of her films is called "My First Porn #7."), is a high end call girl. Chris Santos plays Chris, a personal trainer to the same set, and her boyfriend. The film compares and contrasts her relationships with her clients to his relationship with his, and theirs with each other, using the backdrop of the financial system meltdown of last fall in Manhattan.

Much of this happens in subtleties. It didn't strike me 'til we'd been home for half an hour or so that each of the investment suggestions that Chelsea's clients recommend to her had a few levels to them. The film is only 77 minutes long, but doesn't seem short at all; every word is carefully chosen, the temporal discontinuity of the film takes effort to piece together, and there's a lot that the film explores that's the sort of thing we gloss over because those are the lies we tell ourselves to stay sane.

But the film has led to some interesting conversations, and I either want to see it again on DVD so that I can skip forward and backwards to put all the pieces together, or to read the screenplay. The poster for the film said "See it with someone you ****", and, yeah, it was a good film for sparking discussion on that.