I met with Phillipe on October 5th and 6th. I wore a Michael Kors dress and shoes with La Perla lingerie underneath, and diamond stud earrings. We met at 7:30 PM at the hotel, and had a drink downstairs. He liked my dress but didn't go into detail why, and didn't mention anything else about my appearance. We ate dinner at Blue Hill. Phillipe didn't ask for a menu and had the chef serve us a five-course meal, a different wine with each course. We went to the 9:40 PM showing of 'Man on Wire' at the Sunshine Cinema, and he liked the movie. We went back to the hotel and talked for half an hour. Mostly about a friend of his that keeps borrowing money from him and not paying it back. Then we had sex for about an hour. After that, we talked for about 15 minutes and he fell asleep. At breakfast, he briefly told me his worries regarding the economy, and he said I should invest my money in gold. He also mentioned a book about how the Federal Reserve works. He didn't make another appointment. (Sasha Grey as Chelsea/Christine Brown in The Girlfriend Experience/2009)
„Steven Soderbergh is a director whose body of work is split evenly down the middle as half experimental projects, and half crowd-pleasing, more entertainment-oriented features. The first category, presumably the favorite of the two for snobby critics, includes early films such as his smash debut Sex, Lies and Videotapes, and the usually disregarded Schizopolis, and more recent endeavors like the masterful Bubble, and 2007’s ode to Michael Curtiz, The Good German. The other category, a decidedly much different one, gave us truly inspired hits like Out of Sight, Ocean’s 11, Erin Brokovich and more recent, Haywire, all of them films that aren’t necessarily as accomplished or daring as his other work, but still first-rate entertainments. Not all of Soderbergh’s experiments are successful, and likewise, his more mainstream endeavors can at times be too light and inconsequential, but his films for me always proke an interesting topic of discussion, and, despite the occasional miss-step, I count myself among the director’s strongest supporters.
The Girlfriend Experience is a movie that follows upper class call-girl Christine or Chelsea (real, big-time adult film star Sasha Grey) through a five-day lapse of time, in the final days leading up to the ‘08 presidential election. The story is told through a non-linear, fractured style which Soderbergh also brialliantly used in his 1998 tempered thriller The Limey. Here, it works in the sense that there are several elongated conversations (Christine’s interview with an elderly man at a meal, her boyfriend’s mainly political banter with friends on a plane to Vegas) that, rather than played straight through, are interwoven into other scenes in the film, in places where Soderbergh sees fit. This gives the film a categorized feel to it, as if we were going through certain topics that come up in the five days we witness in Christine’s life. This could just seem flat and overly controlling, but Soderbergh handles it expertly, giving the film an organized, flowing feel to it.
Although it was impressive to a degree in Bubble, Soderbergh’s digital cinematography experimentation has finally paid off here. He harnesses his camera, using it to capture a day in the life of a person with an unusual profession, while also employing it to incarcerate the time we live in now, shading in Christine’s surroundings with sleek, crystal-clear silvers, blacks, and reds, often using comfortable static wide-angle shots, a nice diversion from the norm shaky camerawork, and intense close-ups, a cliché of independent film as a whole. His cinematography is perfectly in-step with Christine’s invaluable sense of style, and as stone-cold and still as her overall personality, save her few moments of revealing emotion towards the film’s close in which the camera becomes slightly mobile, but not so much that it’s too on the nose. Steven Soderbergh has always been a director of choice, for me personally, but never has he crafted a work so assured, and visually meaningful. Expanding upon his favored style of fractured, out of order storytelling, the director puts a new spin on this almost-gimmick, and proves his hand at staggering cinematography work. For my money, Soderbergh’s stylish, structurally innovative, and visually stunning 19th movie is, bar none, the best film of 2009.” (alg)
P.S.: Îmi cer scuze pentru cei ce nu cunosc engleza (sper că nu-s mulţi!), dar nu am vreme să traduc. Aşa mi-a trimis algernon (alg) contribuţia sa pentru o rubrică pe care o cam neglijasem, aşa o las. E prea bine scris textul pentru a-i găsi eu un echivalent mai breaz în română.