The lingering atmosphere of seamy cynicism is abetted by DP Steven Meizler‘s beautifully composed yet woozily voyeuristic photography, always shooting through windows or mirrors, down aubergine hotel corridors or from adjacent spaces, spying, prying, yet remaining, like Christine, coolly detached from what he is recording. In the manner of Danny Boyle‘s “Trance” or Alex Garland‘s “Ex-Machina” this is a show of reflective surfaces and hard, modernist lines, a kind of plate glass neo-noir aesthetic. And Shane Carruth and David Paterson‘s score (apparently Carruth, who also appears in one episode, did the music for his “Upstream Color” co-star Seimetz’s episodes, while Paterson did Kerrigan’s, but the joins do not show) — all icy synths and peculiar, portentous digital drones — adds to the general feeling of menace and unease.
It also smooths over the deliberately vague time shifts: Sometimes whole swathes of time are swallowed in greedy gulps between scenes and we only realize later that weeks have passed, not hours. Perhaps this is what it’s like to experience life as the kind of asocial, manipulative animal that Christine is: She claims at one point that she doesn’t pursue any relationship unless it “accomplishes” some end. Perhaps all the lost time simply contains low-priority events and encounters that her unsentimental brain has jettisoned as useless.
But all the craft in the world couldn’t make this unswerving focus work without Keough. In a faultlessly understated but forcefully present performance, she makes Christine the ultimate attracti-pulsive heroine, portraying her as a locked enigma without ever seeming blank or vacuous. As time goes on, her face, which seems to change in beauty from one scene to the next without ever quite settling, becomes a source of fascination, and even though we, as opposed to her cam customers, get to look at it endlessly, it mostly remains unfathomable, no matter how much you search it for clues.
The moments when the mask slips are even more impressively carried off by the actress, whose previous work in “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Magic Mike” we liked, but hardly suggested this kind of command. There are only a handful of times in “The Girlfriend Experience” that we see Christine experience genuine emotion (as opposed to the synthetic, limpid-eyed sympathy she manufactures for her johns) — and they’re wordless and compact. At one point, she is uncharacteristically upset in a bathroom stall and with just the tiniest flicker in expression you see the moment the she stops feeling and starts, again, to think. At another, during a pre-coital conversation, her client says something that registers as off and you can almost see the adrenaline flood that occurs behind Keough’s eyes, as the fight-or-flight instinct kicks in.
But otherwise, “what is going on behind the closed door of that pretty face?” is the question that tickers in your mind throughout the whole show. It makes it addictive in a different way than a more plot-based serial might be, and far more so than the “ooh, sexcapades!” possibilities teased by its logline. In fact, the show’s treatment of sex, while hardly prudish, is remarkably cerebral. Although there is a lot of it, usually heterosexual but not always, and the fact we see much more of Keough’s naked body than any man’s leaves it open to accusations of “male gaze”-iness, the sex scenes are character development, not titillation. The “gaze” in these noticeably un-messy scenes, if anything, feels Teflon-coated and oddly detached, perhaps because it really belongs to Christine (or, in her call-girl persona “Chelsea”).
She has a tendency to close her eyes, throw her head back and stop her partner speaking when she is about to orgasm. It’s a pose we see her in several times, and each time that question recurs: What is she thinking? What is happening in her head? We can’t know for sure, but a later scene shows Christine watching, with riveted attention, home-security CCTV footage of herself masturbating.
It makes me imagine that to bring herself to orgasm, Christine imagines herself watching herself pleasuring herself — her narcissism is that all-encompassing. It’s what makes her the complex, twisted and fascinating creature that she is.
And it also proves the show’s feminist credentials, beyond its nonjudgmental attitude toward prostitution. Beyond even all the other intriguing supporting female characters, from Kate Lyn Sheil’s slinky frenemy to Mary Lynn Rajskub‘s flinty power lawyer to Seimetz as Christine’s down-to-earth sister, even though the lunching scenes in which women trade glances that glint like swords over scallops and Sancerre are among the show’s best. Beyond the fact that you could see Christine, in both her call-girl persona and as a scheming intern at a big law firm, as somehow sticking it to The Patriarchy. Really, “The Girlfriend Experience” is feminist simply because Christine is interesting in a way that male protagonists have always been allowed to be interesting: for their psychologies, in and of themselves, for the riddles they are that we want to solve, without reference to any other character, and without the burden of having to be likable.
Traditionally, you’re supposed to want either to have sex with a female character or to aspire to be like her. But even if I didn’t hover boringly at the lower end of the Kinsey scale, I just don’t believe I’d be that hot for Christine — does anyone really get off on the idea of being duped into a borderline sociopath’s frictionless simulacrum of intimacy? And despite her enviable, prim yet sexy wardrobe and the lifestyle that all that money buys, I really don’t want to be her either — for one thing I’d be constantly barking my shins on all those sharp, shiny surfaces. Christine is a character I don’t want to be or be with, and I don’t have to like. I just want to watch her, and to try to figure her out.
This cerebral voyeurism makes “The Girlfriend Experience” one of the most grown-up shows on TV. It takes itself seriously and it earns the seriousness of its tone by dispensing deeply pessimistic noir-wisdom about the transactional nature of modern relationships, our digitized, atomized lives, our fractured identities. It presents an unsmiling world where control is only ever an illusion, sometimes a delusion. The show is bigger even than Christine (and she is immense), and its mood lingers, making you second-guess some of your own interactions, making you wonder what kind of people we are and what future we’re hurtling towards, when this coldhearted, dispassionate drama can feel so compelling.
So abandon what you think a show about a call girl will be like. It’s designed less to arouse than to spook, and the “double life” narrative from where it derives a lot of its drama zigzags so often it’s hard to know if Chelsea or Christine is the more real, more fundamental persona (this isn’t some Jekyll/Hyde or Beyoncé/Sasha Fierce duality). And it is not an arc of innocence lost or goodness corrupted either. Instead it tracks a different trajectory as, for better or worse, this young woman becomes more herself — more powerful, more certain, more isolated, more dangerous, more exquisitely unknowable. The story of a call girl accorded as much personhood, charisma and agency as any toweringly insane turn-of-the-century oil tycoon, if “The Girlfriend Experience” is a peep show at all, we’re peeping into the inky abyss of Christine’s soul, and the abyss peeps right back.
“The Girlfriend Experience” debuts this Sunday on Starz.
