Bearing some similarities to Bubble, this is one of those low budget fragments of a movie that Soderbergh makes in between the glossier Hollywood fare. Lasting only 75 minutes, Girlfriend examines a few days in the life of high end prostitute, played by real-life porn star, Sasha Grey. There is no sex and barely any nudity. Instead we see Chelsea (Grey’s name in this film) meeting and talking to clients, and meeting with an assortment of journalists, webmasters and suchlike who might be able to raise her profile and money potential. We also follow her boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), who works as a personal trainer. Most of the stories are unexplained and cut short. Chris is going on a comp-ed trip to Vegas with some male friends and the camera occasionally cuts to the men on a private jet discussing women. Chris leaves a package for Chelsea, but we don’t know what it contains. At some point Chelsea contemplates leaving Chris and becoming more serious with a client she has never met. But it is all pretty aimless. The cinematography is superb, all angles, reflections and middle distance shots. Almost everything about this movie made me think of Van Sant, especially its fragmentary, non-linear narrative, and generally aimless character.
The theme is money and its pursuit, by Chelsea, by Chris, by all the men trying to get a piece of Chelsea, and above all by her clients, who are well-heeled New York men in the throes of the recent financial crisis. They are as likely to want to talk to her about the state of their portfolios as to want to fuck her. Perhaps this should have been called Capitalism: A Love Story. Recommended for sure, if only for effort and craft, but this movie lacked the warmth and familiarity that either Van Sant brings to the same kind of material, or actors like Pitt and Clooney bring to Soderbergh’s movies.
I was just about to log in and end my posting drought with a reaction to this and the new Mendes/McSweeneys mess. Indie tics — both movies, to greater and lesser effect, rely upon a slew of techniques and quirks (alas) that suggest an answer to a question John (or one of John’s students) posed some while ago: what is the ‘genre’ of indie film?
(Let’s set aside whether “indie” as a production category makes any sense with bigshots like Sam Mendes and Steven S, even in his handheld lo-budget non-actor mode.)
To the greater first: at first I liked Girlfriend quite a bit, for many of the reasons Chris notes. I like chilly, and–as in Bubble–there’s something alluring about the blank affectlessness of Grey, her blank smile of a trainer boyfriend, the bland powermen who hire her. (The one small glimmer of personality comes from movie critic Glenn Kenny playing a sleazeball internet “expert” called the Erotic Connossieur, who almost leaves a trail of bodily fluids as he unctuously slithers across the screen.) I enjoy the knot of narrative Soderbergh likes to play with; the soundtrack was an adroitly-defined complement, occasionally bursting onto center stage (a glorious drum solo from a street performer, a Vegas arrival timed to one of David Holmes’ catchiest electropop confections, a la Oceans films). And what’s not to like about the thesis: capitalism is about fucking people, or trying to get people to fuck you.
But in retrospect my appreciation dimmed, slightly. Why the knot? In his bravura Limey such cut-up editing brilliantly captured something about the many displacements of Terence Stamp’s character, amplified the suspense of the plot, formally enhanced the film’s vision. But in Girlfriend, it’s mainly experience. I guess you could call it some kind of Godardian anti-cinema, a resistance to the pleasures of conventional narrative, and yet I got the feeling that such “experiment” actually improves my appreciation–took a tedious straightline account of amorality and gave it a hollow but enjoyable puzzlebox veneer. I’d call it an indie tic ’cause it seemed predetermined: rather than a formal challenge issued to shape the film, it’s a formal exercise, conventional counter-conventional for its own sake.
Mind you, I still like the film. It just a day later seems far slighter than my initial pleasure suggested.
On the other hand, I pretty much hated Away We Go for its relentless plundering of indie quirk. I had wanted to like it: the anti-Eggers backlash (he and novelist Vendela Vida, also his wife, wrote the script) always seems misguidedly derisive and mean to me; I love the cast; whenever a critic claims that a comedy makes fun of its characters I have a kneejerk need to see the film as, instead, generous.
And, actually, even as lovable parents-to-be John Kracinski and Maya Rudolph travel the country (ostensibly to find a place to settle–a “home,” see?) and meet a crew of horrible cartoon parents and then another matched set of good but pained parents, the cartoonishness of the film’s vision of assholes and adorables didn’t strike me as mean-spirited.
Just ham-handed. And ham-footed. And hammy. (Poor Allison Janney.) I appreciate the desire to juggle tonal discordance, to flirt with scorn and sap in equal measures. It’s just done so poorly here, the soundtrack of indie emo noodling so oppressively constant (Mendes’ use of the score/songs here makes Spike Lee look cinema verite), we almost turned the film off. By the time we hit Miami, I had turned on the subtitles and would skim quickly along, reading rather than watching, just to rush to the (ah yes) inevitable happy end (which was to return to a childhood home–of course! how gloriously meta AND sincere!).
The script may indeed be a bit hard to negotiate, but I think all blame falls on Mendes, who squanders the significant potential for bite and heart. He’s stuck in indie-tic-land, adding visual flourishes (a plane caught fractured in a skyscraper’s windows) that add nothing (they’re not even that pretty or interesting), losing the possible oomph of these performers in shite theatricality. (The leads play it lowkey, understating the sentiment, banking on Kracinski’s skill at reaction shots to–for the most part–keep the couple’s interactions with assorted others far less jarring than it might have been.) The aforementioned soundtrack made me want to beat up Sufjan Stevens. Everything about the movie ends up seeming calculated, when I think buried in the crass carny bark for hipster cred is a real lovely movie about becoming parents and how these two protagonists’ worldviews inform and shape everything else we see. (I kept imagining David O. Russell owning this material, really selling its outsized swings of mood, tone, personality.)
But it, alas, sucks.
On the other hand, 37 miles (straight down) from “quirky” (and more than a few east of comfortable), Ronald Brownstein’s sui generis study in abjection Frownland is utterly engrossing. The film follows (for the most part) an utterly desperate piece of spluttering, forehead-rubbing, grimace-faced humanity named Keith Sontag (played with utmost commitment by Dore Mann).
The film opens with Keith mooning troll-like about his dingy kitchen “room” as a strange monster movie plays on television. A kind of bargain-basement grape-ape creature picks up and tries to play a guitar, then shrieks and throws the instrument on the floor. Keith’s phone rings. It is a weeping woman (Laura, played by Mary Wall), and Keith meets her downstairs, climbs in her car, tries inadequately–pathetically–to stutter out something consoling, until (furious?) she runs out to a gas station. While she’s gone, he grabs his face, and twists and pulls — holding his eyes open, making horrible keening moans. By the time she’s returned, his frozen pained stare has mustered up a few false tears, and he turns–almost hopefully–to her, seeking some kind of connection.
That’s the first five minutes, pre-title. This film is on occasion strangely crazily bleakly funny, and as often sort of numbing and just bleak, and as often a Howl of social pain. Everyone in the film is ferociously disconnected, every attempt at connection is ferociously rebuffed. It’s a Jerry Lewis film reimagined by Edward Munch.
It ends with what many reviewers call a descent into madness, poor Keith’s breakdown–and it certainly crescendoes in a distilled blast of the social impotence, the stuttering inability to be seen or heard or understood that has plagued him throughout. But I’m not sure I’d call this a psychological study…its pitch too off-kilter, its occasional forays into other characters’ lives illustrating a shift from expressionist focus on Keith to a more ambiguous examination of a world where everyone is utterly bereft of empathy or understanding. Nothing horrible happens, but it’s as unblinking a vision of malign humanity as I’ve seen in some time, and it’s very, very tough to watch. It makes Soderbergh’s film seem like Capra. And yet its abjection made me care, even as it repulsed.
Very, very damn interesting film.