Chris, you see, is a personal trainer and, as such, someone who is also always hustling for rich clients to whom he may sell his body and the illusion of friendship. So, too, does Christine's rather improbable live-in boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), whose parallel resonances do not end with his name. New York magazine writer Mark Jacobson plays, appropriately enough, a reporter trying to get inside Christine's head film blogger-critic Glenn Kenny plays a porn blogger-critic trying to get inside her pants.
But the rest of the (nonprofessional) cast spends most of their time, like us, marveling at how closed off she is. It would have been possible, I suppose, for Soderbergh to work his way around the collapsed star at the center of his film if the characters in her orbit brought something to the encounters, if she were a mirror held up to their desires and disappointments. "See," the film practically assures us, "she's playing someone who's completely affectless." Either way, we're left with little more than the pretty surfaces, which those inclined could presumably see at greater expanse in Grey's other work.
Indeed, in what is either a commendably honest internal critique or, more likely, an attempt to head off inevitable complaints about the performance, character after character in the film comments on how remote Christine is. Christine and Chelsea (and, one can't help but imagine, Grey) are indistinguishable: blank, dull, prone to choosing her words carefully and choosing the most banal ones imaginable. There are layers upon layers here-a porn star taking on a serious acting role in which she plays a woman whose job is to make herself an object of male fantasy-but it's unclear whether Grey is aware of any of them. Once the novelty of the casting wears off, the performance offers nothing to hold onto, no meaningful insight into either the character, Christine (clients know her as "Chelsea"), or Grey herself. In cinematic terms, though, the stunt fails dismally. Watching Grey, at least at first, it's hard not to wonder how her experience at the sexual extremes informs her performance in a role that is, ironically, quite a bit tamer than her day job. And on those terms, I suppose, the stunt succeeds.
THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE 2009 NAKED SKIN
At age 18, she received the prizes for "Best Three Way Sex Scene" and "Best Group Scene" at the Adult Video News Awards at 19, she was a Penthouse Pet of the Month and also became the youngest starlet ever to win the AVN award for "Female Performer of the Year." Now 21, she is already at work on an autobiographical documentary about her brief but triumphal march through the skin trade.Īll of which is to say that director Steven Soderbergh's decision to cast Grey as a high-end Manhattan escort in his micro-indie The Girlfriend Experience is a stunt, a way of attaching complicated resonances (and, yes, some prurient buzz) to the film. It's not often that an actress can boast of having her name above the title on her very first mainstream film, but then Sasha Grey is not just any actress.
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