'The Girlfriend Experience': You'll Want To Stay With Her
Starz has a big hit with Outlander, much of whose fan-base is thoroughly engrossed in the 18th-century steaminess of its romance adventures. Perhaps the channel thought it was time to get some 21st-century erotica with The Girlfriend Experience, a TV adaptation of Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film that starred porn star Sasha Grey. It turns out that this new Experience is soft-core provocative and a lot more — a vivid character study, a tense law-firm drama, and an educational deep-dive for any viewer who’d like to learn the ins and outs of what we researchers call “transactional sex.”
The series, which premieres on Starz starting on Sunday, stars Riley Keough (Mad Max: Fury Road) as Christine Reade, second-year law student and intern at a Chicago law firm by day, thousand-dollar-an-hour hooker by night. She performs her latter duties for an escort service, her boss a briskly no-nonsense business-woman who sets Christine up with assignations that sometimes turn into longer-term “girlfriend experiences” with a variety of needy men of all shapes, sizes, and varying degrees of charm, obnoxiousness, and piteousness.
From this unpromising premise, the two brains behind this TV series — writer-directors Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan — devise something smart and engaging. For Christine, servicing egotistical attorneys in doing their grunt work is not much different from servicing self-centered clients who are paying as much to have someone listen to them drone on about their well-paying but boring jobs as they are to get their jollies off. Seimetz and Kerrigan, who have co-written every episode and take turns directing the 13 half-hour entries, move on from that facile comparison early in the proceedings, to explore two main plots.
The first involves possible illegal behavior at the law firm that seems to involve Christine’s first boss, David (Paul Sparks, perhaps best known for playing a prickly sell-out author on House of Cards), and another, even tougher, member of the firm played by 24’s Mary Lynn Rajskub. The second plot spreads across a few of Christine’s clients, whose various bad behaviors begin to chip away at her confidence and complicate her life in a potentially dangerous way.
Girlfriend maintains a cool, detached tone that nevertheless avoids cheap irony. Seimetz and Kerrigan decline to psychoanalyze Christine; even when she asks her sister (played by Seimetz) whether she, Christine, might fit the clinical profile of a sociopath, the filmmakers make clear that they have not decided on such a definition of her. This is something more than just enlightened thinking about sex work — it’s the strategy of a creative duo that wants, and succeeds, in hooking us into the thoughts and actions of a smart, unpredictable woman.
Seimetz and Kerrigan are helped enormously by Keough’s performance. She is the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and therefore the granddaughter of Elvis and Priscilla, and Keough has the family’s gene-pool poker-face, a still expression that remains on high-alert, ever-ready to figure out other people’s motives for wanting to be close to her.
The Girlfriend Experience has a great, sleek look, created with the help of director of photography Steven Meizler. Using mostly natural lighting and shooting the actors either at eye level or having the camera hover just slightly over their heads, he achieves a fluid intimacy that’s not at all like the porn filmmaking the show’s premise exists to contradict.
I’d recommend that, if possible, you binge-watch the show — Starz is making all 13 episodes available on its Starz Play and On Demand platforms. The show works best as an immersive experience in Christine’s tricky life.
The Girlfriend Experience airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on Starz.
