Renek Gaszewski [Blog]

Penetrable and impenetrable at the same time, the archetypal prostitute remains a compelling riddle to the male psyche.
Rented, but never owned, she inflates and destabilizes the male ego in one blood-draining gesture.
In short, the hooker’s mystique resides - almost entirely - within the masculine mind and its myriad expressions in modern popular culture, from the grotesquely Disney-fied look at flesh-peddling in Pretty Woman, to the lowest common denominator of the lap dance: The gal who provides sex, and genuinely appears to want it, is the fantasy that seems too good to be true.
And as Steven Soderbergh shows us in his latest effort, The Girlfriend Experience, that’s usually because it is.
Prostitutes are just people, and in a lot of cases, pretty average ones at that - resulting in a sizable gap between the desired fiction and the ultimate reality, and it’s in this dizzying, amorphous hole that Soderbergh places his latest narrative.
Lying prone at the centre of the frame is Chelsea (bona fide porn star Sasha Grey), a Manhattan call girl trying to make her way up the clientele ladder.
Bearing a striking resemblance to the woman who bagged former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s libido and, in turn, his promising political career, Chelsea has a list of regulars that includes several Wall Street brokers, an Orthodox Jew and diamond dealer, and a soft-spoken Hollywood screenwriter.
She’s feeling good about herself and her rising status within the sex-for-money subculture, but poor Chelsea’s personal life is beginning to suffer.
Her ambitious boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) is trying to make a breakthrough in the world of personal training, but the economic downturn has forced people to count their own pushups - limiting his chances at fitness guru fame.
Ramping up the mental complexity factor are Chelsea’s professional ego needs: She’s trying to become one of the Big Apple’s biggest sex bombs, but in order to do so, she will have to bed the industry’s biggest blogger: A bald, obese furniture salesman with poor hygiene and a foul personality.
Poor Chelsea: She thinks she’s making all the right career moves and finding a way to self-empowerment, when in fact she’s really just selling her body to the highest bidder.
In most movies, Chelsea would be portrayed as the tragic waif without the education or resources to resurrect her self-esteem without the aid of a male millionaire who looks like Richard Gere.
At least that way, she’s likely to seem sympathetic as she sits and listens to the endless droning of her clients, who mostly want to chat her up instead of doing the down and dirty deed.
Yet, in The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh makes it undeniably obvious that Chelsea is a little too selfish, and plenty too stupid, to be anything more than a curious casualty of popular culture.
The woman is a total void. When she writes in her diary, she has the depth to document her clothing choice for each date, and little else. She can barely string more than five words together in a single sentence before lowering her eyelids to a suggestive half-mast. It’s like watching a talking Barbie on low-battery for the duration.
At times, you almost want to throw her and her self-absorption across the room in a roundly destructive gesture that will finally make her stop spurting tedious drivel. The rest of the time, you can sit back and appreciate the bigger - and funnier - picture Soderbergh creates just behind the action as he shows us one emotionally needy man after another sucking life-affirmation from a silicon teat.
Who’s more pathetic is hard to figure. Is it the man who dreams of possessing the whore as his very own special love, or the whore who thinks she’s empowering herself by selling limited edition slices of her own soul?
If everyone in this movie weren’t so stupid, selfish and morally vacant, The Girlfriend Experience would have to be a tragedy echoing nothing less than the epic strains of 19th-century French literature.
But Chelsea is a very far cry from Emma Bovary. She’s an utterly empty vessel who elicits no sympathy or emotional response. She’s the embodiment of cheap, meaningless sex elevated to an absurd level of esteem.
One can only hope the sad irony and amusing inanity in the piece were intentional, because that way, Soderbergh gets points for continuing his Sex, Lies and Videotape odyssey into modern sexuality.
On the other hand, if the director thought Chelsea was a truly compelling character deserving of so much attention, The Girlfriend Experience would be a complete flop because she’s mind-numbingly dull, despite her physical assets.

Just weeks after model Miranda Kerr stripped bare to ameliorate the plight of koalas, she has again appeared nude. And this time there’s no native fauna nearby.
The 26-year-old proved she can definitely leave her hat on, with a series of photographs from next year’s Pirelli Calendar becoming an instant Internet sensation.
The photographs were lifted from the latest edition of Italian Vanity Fair magazine, the Sunday Telegraph reports.
They document the making of the provocative 2010 calendar. There is also an accompanying video.
Kerr stars alongside fellow Australian models Abbey Lee Kershaw and Catherine McNeil in the shoot.
While much was made of Kerr’s nude Rolling Stone cover a fortnight ago, most of her modesty was strategically covered.
But not here.
While bare breasts are a staple of the sought-after calendar, the picture of McNeil is highly suggestive. The 20-year-old is photographed pouring milk over her breasts and body.
The 2010 calendar’s photographer, American Terry Richardson, has a dubious reputation for his overtly sexual work, often with teenagers.
Kathy Ward, of Chic Management - the trio’s Australian agency - said the shoot took place in Brazil two months ago. Ward said she was surprised the behind-the-scenes photographs had become such a sensation.
She said she had not spoken to the girls since they did the shoot.
“They’ve all been so busy overseas we haven’t really chatted but, from what I’ve heard, I believe the shoot went well,” she said.
“It’s interesting that the photos have come out.
“Usually there’s such tight security surrounding Pirelli that no images are revealed before the launch of the calendar.”
More photos from the shoot are expected to be released in November, prior to the calendar’s release.
The Pirelli Calendar is not for sale but is given as a corporate gift to a limited number of customers, clients and celebrities.

Contrary to popular misconception, Sasha Grey only plays a hooker in the movies.
The 21-year-old star of Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience makes her living mainly as a porn actor, appearing in more than 150 adult films in the past three years. Her acrobatic work has been seen in such memorable titles as Teenage Whores 3 and I Wanna Bang Your Sister.
She trades in sexual fantasies, but she doesn’t physically fulfill them on a professional basis. Grey told all in a call from Los Angeles:
Is it true that you were originally going to call yourself Anna Karina, after the French New Wave star, and that Soderbergh wanted you to watch the films she made with Jean-Luc Godard?
There are certain people who resonate with you in life. Some girls like their teenie-bop actors or their Tiger Beat actors, but (Karina) is someone whom I’ve always admired. Steven asked me to watch Vivre sa vie and also Pierrot le fou to prepare for my role and I was already a fan of both of those films. It was obviously exciting that I got to revisit those.
Rolling Stone called you The Dirtiest Girl in the World in a headline. Does this bother you?
It’s reciprocal. Would I have said, `Hey, I’m the dirtiest girl in porn, put that on your magazine?’ No, but at the same time, it was a good opportunity to (promote) me. It doesn’t make me angry, but it doesn’t make me jump for joy, either. I guess I’m complacent about certain things like that.
Are men or women more fascinated with the call-girl theme?
It’s hard to say, because I don’t read reviews and most of the reaction I get is by word of mouth. It’s one of those subjects that people are either going to love or they hate: “A film about prostitution? Is it okay to glamorize it?” People obviously haven’t seen the film when they make comments like that, because the film isn’t just about prostitution, it’s about many things.
It’s a controversial subject that’s easy for people to formulate their own judgments or opinions on.
Were you surprised by how little sex there is in this movie?
Going into it I thought there would for sure be a sex scene, but did I think it would be rampant and all over the place? No. But at the same time, I did think there would be a sex scene in it. There’s nothing that starts to get you turned on.
Were you relieved that it wasn’t extremely sexual?
Not necessarily. Because it was Steven directing, I would have felt comfortable with it. I know he would have done what fit into the story.
Had it been an independent filmmaker who I never heard of and I wasn’t familiar with their work, I probably wouldn’t have.
What if Soderbergh had asked you to do hardcore porn scenes. Would you have agreed?
Hell, yeah! I don’t think he would, but if he did, it’d be brilliant.