From www.thestranger.com- “Girlfriend experience” is a term used by chichi, expensive, $2,000-an-hour escorts to describe not just paid fucking, but the accompanying personal time—lots of kissing, cuddling, hair tussling, and talking. Oh, the TALKING. This is a movie all about talk-talk-TALKing. It’s a story about relationships and sex—yet there isn’t any sex in the film. All they do is TALK. And talk. And talk some more.

I’m sure some people will see this film just because the lead, Chelsea, a gorgeous and business-minded Manhattan call girl, is played by real-life porn star Sasha Grey. Grey is a superstar pioneer in the adult-film industry—smart, atypically and naturally beautiful, and a fearless triple-X extremist. Think of the most extreme sexual act you can imagine, and Grey has probably done it. Twice. It’s this extremism that’s absolutely lacking in The Girlfriend Experience, and I don’t mean just in the physical sense.

Chelsea’s life and her relationship with her bubble-headed gym bunny of a boyfriend, Chris (a metrosexual-looking and completely unbelievable character), are absolutely devoid of human emotion, leaving the characters and their relationship inconceivably ordinary. Soderbergh was definitely trying to explore the cold, unaffected, unemotional world that sex workers have to live in, but Grey’s dead-eyed and too-frequent blank stares leave Chelsea’s character flat as a pancake. She ends up seeming disinterested, inaccessible, and, well, boring and/or perpetually bored.

Set in pre-2008-election New York City, Girlfriend also comments on economic anxieties, politics, and the state of capitalism. But these points get lost in all the talk-talk-talking and in the zero chemistry between Chelsea and Chris. An emotionless interaction between Chelsea and a screenwriter client, which finally makes her cry one or two tears of actual vulnerability, seems to serve as the film’s climax—if you can really credit the plot as having one of those. Sadly, though beautifully shot by an A-plus ace director, Girlfriend is the first film out of hundreds that Grey has made that simply doesn’t ever climax. recommended