The House Next Door

I love this blog, but I must protest this review. I haven't seen the film yet and I respect your dislike of it. However, the personal attacks on Soderberg are way out of line. Critics must not go down the road of ad hominem. This type of film (sex as the subject) seems to invite these kinds of speculations, but it is utterly immoral to slander Soderberg personally.

I'm bummed by this review. I am in awe of Soderbergh's productivity, versatility and ability to multitask, but I haven't felt any strong emotions, or even much involvement, watching one of his movies since "Solaris" (and before that, "The Limey"). And his tendency to give me the gist of an interesting concept (a "40s movie" with "The Good German," a DIY drama with "Full Frontal" and "Bubble," etc) without really digging deep is quite frustrating.

I agree with you, Matt, one hundred percent. Now that I’ve immorally slandered Soderbergh personally, let me make up for it by saying I absolutely admire the man’s ability to build one of the most enviable careers in filmmaking today. The problem is Soderbergh’s completely emotionally disconnected from his subject matter. What’s frustrating is I really can’t figure out why he even bothers to make movies anymore. There’s simply no passion behind the lens.

Anonymous again...I respectfully propose that passion and emotional connectedness are overrated. I think we should surrender to a film and try not to impose too many expectations on it. For what it's worth, I don't think that emotional involvement is a mark of quality at all. Feelings are important, but so are ideas, things, environments, the zeitgeist, and craftsmanship.

I'm going straight to the Lagoon after work. I'm intrigued.

I thought this film was a culmination of everything Soderbergh has been doing experimentally for the last 5 films. Further, I think it's his most technically assured and interesting picture since The Limey. Some of the scenes don't work and Grey doesn't have the range to assuage most awards voters, but she fit the character as written and isn't as bad as this critic implies, at least to my mind.

Further, I think Wissot spends a bit too much time trying to connect this film to her own experiences, which really don't matter to me. IMdb description aside (IMdb really?), the film is as much about a point in time culturally as it is about one lone call girl's life. I don't know, I could be wrong, but regardless of her porn star bonafides I'd imagine a woman such as Christine would have no trouble finding clients, her business acumen not withstanding.

See the film for yourself. This review isn't much of a review.

I've seen GE, and it makes hiring an escort look extremely boring. Not much there behind a bit of surface fizz and the casting of the inexpressive Grey; at two points the camera drifts off her to focus on a lighting fixture, as if even Soderbergh couldn't maintain interest. Then again I might hire Glenn Kenny to verbally abuse me for a couple of hours.

Anonymous: I'm not saying that movie's got to be warm, or reach out to the audience directly or indirectly, to inspire passion or involvement in this viewer (I'm a fan of a lot of filmmakers who are labeled "cold" and a lot of movies that are considered opaque).

I just mean that a lot of Soderbergh's post-"Limey" work feels more about craft/technique/experimentation than the urge to actually say something. I often feel I'm watching a dry run or rough draft of something that I wish had been more developed. That reaction (while admittedly personal) is absolutely about the sum total of all the factors you mentioned: "ideas, things, environments, the zeitgeist, and craftsmanship." All have been present, to greater or lesser degrees, in everything Soderbergh has attempted in the last decade, but he doesn't always fuse them in a way that I find convincing and coherent, or intriguing in anything but an Ed Sullivan plate-spinner, "How can one guy do so many things?" sort of way.

That said, I was a big fan of Soderbergh's two HBO series, "K Street" (which he was quite involved with) and "Unscripted" (somewhat less so), and found them engrossing as well as formally playful. And the exercise-like parameters of "K Street" (every episode conceived, shot and finished within seven days) gave the whole thing a high-wire aspect that compensated for some of the more half-baked parts.

ROTFLMAO. As usual.

Wissot talks big, but doesn't even have the (metaphorical) balls to actually name the axe she so dearly wants to grind. So much for her transexual queer identity, I guess.

I know, I've gone against Fussell's law by weighing in here. But what the hell.

I actually liked the movie for a lot of the reasons you did not - I found its distance from the subject (both sex and Chelsea herself) to be intriguing. I thought Soderbergh's decision (in collaboration with David Levien and Brian Koppelman) to turn away from the sex and examine the business of prostitution, especially high-end prostitution, was fascinating.

Similarly, Sasha Grey's lack of emotion, whether by accident or by design, informs Chelsea quite a bit - I like that she was a little cold, a little unlikeable, a little intriguing, and entirely distant. The extent to which the distance of her character informed the distance the structure of the film creates, or vice versa...I don't know, but it was one of the more harmonious relationships between character and form I've seen in some time.

That said, no, I didn't LOVE it, in a "I-want-to-take-it-home-and-cuddle-with-it-all-day-long," but it's not a terribly emotional film. But I'm actually okay with that (and, apparently, using far too many conjunctions).

I do not think Soderbergh was going for an emotional feel. He wanted an impersonal study of Chelsea, and yes, in turn of himself and his industry. So much so that he hired film critic/writer Glenn Kenny to do what he does best, criticize.

Soderbergh's camera acts as the eye of a voyeur watching Chelsea go about her life. This way we cannot get emotionally attached.

Just like in his experimental Che (the best film of 2008 by the way) Soderbergh uses not passion but a systematic, extremely methodical procedure as his filmmaking style. This is more about the act of filmmaking than anything else.

Soderbergh has managed, as the Howard Hawks of modern cinema, to have a career as diverse as anything. With deep dark films (Sex, lies & videotape, Kafka) and fun romps (Out of Sight and the Ocean films) and genre pics (The Good German and his Solaris remake) and experimentals (Bubble, Full Frontal and GFE) Soderbergh is a chameleon director.

Girlfriend Experience may lack the "passion" of some of his films, but as a formal essay on filmmaking and the film industry, through the thinly veiled guise of the sex industry (even using a bonafide porn star - replete with Godard eyes) GFE is great fun indeed.

Even my favorite director Stanley Kubrick always had a fire in his cold belly! I could care less if a director is going for an “emotional feel.” I just want to know he has a passion for the act of filmmaking itself, which I just don’t get from Soderbergh anymore.

Well, judging that Soderberg lacks passion is pretty subjective and totally personal. It can't be proved or disproved, so you'll never be wrong. Sort of like staring into the abyss, isn't it?

Film criticism is pretty subjective and totally personal.

Lauren-If you don't think Soderbergh has "a passion for the act of filmmaking itself", then you aren't looking. I mean, if there's one thing he clearly has a passion for, it's "filmmaking itself"---whatever you might think of GfE's sex-industry research, it's cinematically terrifically apt. I especially appreciate how a movie that's all about unknowability and distance constantly places objects (usually out of focus) in front of the characters, keeping us very aware that these people are not immediately accessible to us, or anyone else. Even in the climactic breakup scene, when the camera pushes in to bring us closer to their emotional conflict, furniture keeps Chelsa almost entirely out of our sight.

That's a lot of what I like about this film, and Bubble before it---they're very emotional films, but they keep us from investing all our emotion in the characters, who maintain a taciturn dignity. We're meant to identify with them in a more complex way than "they cry, so I cry" (or, as you would prefer, "they take off their clothes, I feel sexy")---we're instead invited to watch them struggle and apply that to our lives or not as we choose.

Here, though, you seem to simply have the same beef with Soderbergh that you had with Catherine Breillat---it's a movie about a sex worker that isn't hawt hawt hawt enough for your tastes. Which is, I guess, fine, albeit kind of stupid, much like your suggestion that Chris would be doing escorting himself (he actually *is* a personal trainer, a job lots of people prefer to escorting, if you can wrap your head around that). All reviewing is subjective, and if you can't understand how other people, including other people in the sex industry, might be really different from you, well, that's your reaction and that's fine, but it's lame and, as you say, narcissistic.

But what's not fine is saying that Soderbergh hasn't gone deep enough, or isn't engaged enough, because he hasn't come to the conclusions you like. In GfE, he looks at prostitution as one of the many ways in which relationships become transactional (the ongoing comparison of Chelsa's situation with Chris' is obviously pretty thematically central, especially when Chris' trip to Vegas blurs his own role with his clients). He does so with the usual sharp cinematic intelligence, that is, with shots and cuts that reinforce the themes he's interested in (besides all the foreground furniture, I never did get tired of the "PUBLIC" sign, which is both transparent and backwards, summing up the entire film in a single Godardian image). And he does it with touches that are often recognizable and funny (oy, that McCain voter!).

Again, you're welcome to make your usual complaint about the movie---it didn't make you horny, therefore it's a bad movie. But to call a movie this politically connected, thematically complex, and cinematically intelligent "unengaged" goes beyond subjective and into just plain flat out wrong.

@ Matt: Well, I too hated The Good German, but I loved Bubble and Full Frontal. But if you liked K Street (which I found a little too abstract), you might find this one really interesting. The nonlinear storytelling is maybe unnecessary, or maybe not---it does a good job of conveying people who are never quite sure where they stand, but it can make the film a little hard to access on a first viewing. But as I say above, it definitely knows what it's trying to say, and says it in some very smart ways, so it's certainly a film worth seeing.

I dunno Fuzzy...I've never gotten Soderbergh's appeal. Even with The Limey, which almost everyone cites as one of Soderbergh's best, I didn't connect with Stamp's character and couldn't shake the feeling that his "dangerousness" was artificially created for my benefit. BTW, I'm neither an ex-con nor a bad-ass, so this isn't a personal reaction ;)

I respect Soderbergh's technical talent. But mostly, as with Hitchcock's lessor efforts, his style strikes me as a distraction that pushes me away more often than it draws me in.

The exception that proves the rule is Out of Sight which, perhaps, owes a lot to Elmore Leonard.

Just my 2 cents.

Oh sure---I can totally understand not getting Soderbergh's appeal. Well, okay, I can only sort of understand, but nu, I get it. I find his stylistic quirks really effective and engaging, others might find them off-putting, and that's all fine.

But I think there's no excuse for saying he seems to have no passion for filmmaking. In TGfE, you might find his style alienating (which it is!), and feel like it keeps you at a remove from the characters (which it does!), but Wissot is insisting that he seems to have nothing much to say about the subject, which is, like, the opposite of true. Whether or not you like what he says or how he says it, he's definitely someone with a point of view that he expresses through formal means, which is to say, an artist (whether he's a good or bad artist is, of course, up to the critic).

I do often feel like Soderbergh has the misfortune to be making genuinely challenging movies---as in, they don't do things we expect movies to do, not as in, ewwww, genital mutilation!---at a time when Kael-worship has metastasized into highbrow philistinism. I can only imagine the blistering reviews critics would give Week End if it showed up at IFC tomorrow---"The pans are long and boring! The dialogue doesn't have any point! I couldn't connect with any of these characters!"

While I agree with MZS's observation that Soderbergh often seems to be experimenting, and while I agree with the notion that Soderbergh's films don't tend to be the kind of material one wants to cuddle with (though I adore Solaris), I agree with the handful of people here who found much to enjoy in TGE, experimental or not.

Fuzzy's last point is a good one...although we don't just pick apart films today as sport -- it's more than that. We (alas, I do this) tend to pick apart films based on our expectations for and of the filmmaker. If one strips that away -- and especially if one avoids evaluating the film based on how well it fulfills its IMDb blurb -- TGE is an interesting, if modest, film in many respects.

Having said that, I do identify with many of the comments above, which seem disappointed less in TGE itself but in Soderbergh; not because the commenters think Soderbergh is shallow but because they see him dancing around his potential without fulfilling it.

Pietrobruno's GFE: GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is out on DVD. "As a filmmaker, I simply wanted to reveal what is hidden - the john". Movies often portray sex-workers, but their customers remain well hidden – faceless and nameless. Pietrobruno's GFE: GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE calls attention to this bias, at the same time as it shifts the cinematic gaze onto the client.