Steven Soderbergh’s 77-minute sketch of a Manhattan escort during the 2008 crash is shrewd about money and thin about people. It is worth an evening for the way the men talk; Sasha Grey, cast for her stillness, is stiller than the film can afford.
Steven Soderbergh shot this in Manhattan in the autumn of 2008, with the banks falling over in the background, and it runs 77 minutes. Chelsea (Sasha Grey), whose real name is Christine, is a call girl at the top of the market, and what she sells is not mainly sex but a girlfriend for the evening: dinner, a film, an interested face across the table. The script is credited to David Levien and Brian Koppelman, though most of the talk sounds made up on the day by people who are not actors, and the film is better for it. It is good on money. It is not much good on anyone.
The men are the best of it. Every client wants to talk about the crash. One tells her what to do with her savings, another explains why the election will finish the country, a third would rather worry aloud about his portfolio than take his jacket off. Sex is the least anxious thing in any appointment she keeps, and her fee is the only money in the film anyone seems sure of. A journalist (Mark Jacobson) interviews her about the work and she answers in the language of a brand consultant: client base, repeat business, managing expectations. We found those scenes quietly chilling, and then we noticed we were sitting where the clients sit, paying attention and being handled.
Soderbergh is his own cinematographer and editor. He shoots on digital with whatever light was already there, so the restaurants are amber and the apartments the flat grey of a November afternoon, and he keeps Chelsea at a distance: through glass, across a lobby, at the edge of the frame while a man in the centre talks. As editor he shuffles her week out of order, so we hear her describe a dress before we see it and a dinner is cut against the notes she writes up afterwards. For half an hour this feels like a diary read in the wrong order, which suits her. After that the shuffle stops adding anything, and we caught ourselves waiting for the next scene rather than watching the one in front of us.
Grey was cast for her stillness and the film gets exactly that. Her face gives almost nothing, which works while Chelsea is at work and stops working the moment the script asks her to be hurt. The reviews split hard on her, from admiration to something close to fury; we land between. It is not a bad performance so much as a narrow one, and Soderbergh has built the whole film to the width of it. Chris Santos plays her boyfriend Chris, who has a weekend in Las Vegas of his own in view and is the one man in the film not paying her, and the film is drier about him than about anyone else. Philip Eytan plays Phillip, a client she likes more than her own rules allow. What she does about that fills the second half, which we will leave alone.
Christopher Peterson’s costumes do more storytelling than the dialogue. Every client gets a different Chelsea, hair and dress and shoes chosen for him, and she records what she wore in the same notes as what he paid. Ross Godfrey’s music comes in sparingly, mostly under the passages between appointments, and the film is otherwise quiet, which is right. The one scene with any heat involves a client who wants something other than what he has booked. It is the only time we see Chelsea lose control of a meeting, and the only scene where the film’s coolness is doing something.
Against Soderbergh’s own record this sits beside Bubble (2005), his other small digital film with unknown faces, and a long way from Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), which was also about people talking around sex but let them say things they meant. Nobody here means anything they say, and the film catches that with real precision. It does not catch much else.
It carries a 15 certificate, which is a fair measure of how little the tagline, with its four asterisks, is telling the truth. There is one idea here and Soderbergh knows, to the minute, how long it lasts.
