A high-end hooker lifes with a struggling personal trainer, she is too independent for his comfort, he is too honest not to tell her. She gets entangled in a web of customers pretending to lover her but returning to her families, website promoters promising to bring her out big-style but actually only chasing freebies, and maybe also her own dissatisfaction about what she stands for.
It took me a while (some years, actually) to understand this is not a RomCom, but one of Soderbergh’s more experimental efforts in filmmaking (after some research I now learned that the GFE word is actually quite clearly defined… who knows that the mongers of the world have their own code). I am all for experimental, and Soderbergh seems to have a soft spot in most of my generation’s hearts, even though he may be the most inconsistent filmmaker ever to show up in an arthouse cinema.
With this film, he shows his love for stylish appearance and rotten inside, or maybe he wants to expose the supposedly tough girl who knows how to get along with her business, but is really a cheap and empty shell who has no control whatsoever over just about anybody. She fails in competition, in love, in advertising… in everything she tries, but holds up the pretentious façade. This can be read completely different, I am sure, but after a while I really started despising her for representing nothing but nothingness.
As a film, it’s not a big thing, just a glance at some people’s lifes, which is perfectly fine to make an interesting film…
thomas4cinema 