The Girlfriend Experience

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

(R)

**

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Five days in the life of a high-class Manhattan hooker

For a film about a call girl, The Girlfriend Experience is rather sexless, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Director Steven Soderbergh has cast hard-core porn star Sasha Grey as a high-priced prostitute who offers men not just sex but the “girlfriend experience”: conversation, companionship, even kissing. The dark, documentary-style film takes place over five days during last fall’s financial meltdown. Attempting to say something about America’s state of affairs, Soderbergh equates “capitalism with prostitution,” creating a situation in which everyone is a hustler. In these hard times, it seems, money is a “powerful and dangerous source of obsession, confusion,­ passion, and calculation.” That’s a provocative idea, but the film cannot handle it, said David Edelstein in New York. Soderbergh tries everything in his power to bring the concept­ to life, but his movie is a “corpse with twitching limbs.” That’s hardly the case, said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. This time, Soderbergh’s relentless experimentation has paid off for the director. He has “captured an America in which the line between selling out and selling yourself has never been thinner.”