Sin #20: Selling Erotica

We all try our hardest to make a living in this world based on our talents and interests. I, for example, studied architecture to become a full-fledged and hardworking architect but there are others who use their physical appearance and sexual appeal as a means to earn their dough. After all, it’s a living.

For a while I thought the escort service was merely a fancy name for prostitution; regardless of the social and economic ranks I thought these women only offered sexual pleasure for a rate.

Well, that’s not quite accurate. Escorts in high level society not only sell their bodies, they sell the whole package, lock stock and barrel. They offer what’s called the “girlfriend experience”.

Take Chelsie, the protagonist of “The Girlfriend Experience”. She’s a hardworking escort that takes her business very seriously; she carefully chooses her clients, advertises herself in a nice web page and becomes involved with the person she’s with. It seems she listens to her customers and even pretends to actually care about them. But it’s a tough life being Chelsie; younger and more attractive girls come every week and the financial crisis has left her with only a handful of clients.

In the movie she is played by Sasha Grey, a famous porn star who makes her debut in a mainstream feature with this movie. She doesn’t overact and simply plays her as a kind of entrepreneur who happens to be an escort (probably mimicking her real-life persona). She’s good in the movie and fortunate to work with a director like Steven Soderbergh who usually chooses interesting projects (unlike Jenna Jameson who chose to star in a sleazy and incompetent horror movie called “Zombie Strippers” as her mainstream debut).

Those expecting sex in the movie will be disappointed since no sexual activity is graphically depicted; in a way, eroticism is not the point of the film (for a movie about eroticism I strongly recommend “The Dreamers”, a powerful and arousing experience). The point is taking prostitution seriously as a profession and not merely a wayward activity.

We can almost admire Chelsie’s dedication as she cruises Manhattan with her lavish lifestyle; with poignancy we can also realize that that life isn’t going to last for long. After all, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.