It is sexy – it aired on Starz in the US, so it actually borders on gratuitous – but the sex is by far the least interesting thing about it. It is part suffocating horror story, part nail-biting legal thriller, part Breaking Bad-style transformation study.
Without giving too much away, the series jumps the rails after three or four episodes and becomes something much more complex. It is nothing you haven’t already seen a hundred times before.īut Siemetz and her co-creator Lodge Kerrigan are too restless to stay on course for long. They are a cookie-cutter, by the numbers origin story, telling the story of a nice girl experimenting with prostitution and staring off into the distance in a heavyhanded demonstration of personal disconnect. You will need to persevere a little because the first couple of episodes are easily the worst of the lot. The third installment of The Girlfriend Experience is set amidst the London tech scene and focuses on Iris. But where that was one-dimensional and camp – a whoops-a-lummy wad of embarrassingly British Carry On fluff that started badly and went nowhere – this is steely and naturalistic, and loose enough to flow into all kinds of genres, sometimes several at once. The closest television analogue to The Girlfriend Experience, at least in the UK, is probably the dreadful Billie Piper vehicle Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
The pedigree of the talent runs deep, and pays off in its refusal to be what you expect. It was co-created and co-written by Amy Siemetz, director of the 2012 thriller Sun Don’t Shine and star of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and Carruth himself provided the cold, synthy score. It follows a young law student – played in a genuinely star-making turn by Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough – as she takes her first steps in the profession, while attempting to balance her studies and an internship at a brazenly corporate law firm. Like the movie, The Girlfriend Experience is a story of prostitution. I ended up watching all 13 in one go, and I have never been happier to be so far behind on my work. “Watch a couple of episodes and see what you think,” my editor told me on Monday. But where that was gossamer thin – a wispy mediation on last decade’s banking crisis – this is a full-blown story with a clear sense of its own momentum and trajectory. The series is superficially based on Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film of the same name. The Girlfriend Experience appeared on Amazon Prime this week, and not a minute too soon.
With Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley and Veep over for the year, Orange is the New Black already binged to completion, and linear television still packed solid with nothing but football and misery, people are crying out for something smart, daring and new to watch. Subtly existential, critical, and melancholic, though slightly hopeful, ending on a bittersweet note - the connections we have to others are superficial, fleeting, and cosmically meaningless, but since that's all we've got, maybe that's enough.You can’t fault The Girlfriend Experience’s timing. But Soderbergh doesn't risk rendering the entire film maddeningly opaque by eschewing narrative entirely, instead, he perfectly rearranges the structure, so the film weaves through these disconnected moments, painting an acutely subjective, albeit limited perspective into Christine's everyday life, where casual conversation is a commodity and her identity is defined by the roles she plays for others. The premiere of this wonderful film took place in theaters in the year 2009. The non-linear structure precisely disorients, so instead of following a straightforward emotional or narrative through line, we take each scene/sequence on its own this lack of traditional context brilliantly frames each interaction as what it essentially is: a transaction. Film The Girlfriend Experience is a film staple that you cant stop seeing. First watch in 10 years, and I love it even more today. A sexually chaste but economically explicit story set against the backdrop of the 2008 recession, The Girlfriend Experience leverages the business of prostitution into an unsubtle look at.