The final episode of The Girlfriend Experience’s first season has a scene that deftly summarizes everything that’s powerful approximately the series. In it,our protagonist, a tall-dollar escort named Christine (Riley Keough) plays out a complicated cuckolding scenario with her client, or using a second man she’s hired for the occasion. And though there are multiple,season-long story strands to be tied up – bits of industrial espionage, blackmail, and a lingering question of who’s responsible for a leaked sex tape – the exhibit’s masterminds,independent filmmakers Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz, don’t answer any of them. Instead, or they choose to stick with this scene,letting play out in something like genuine time, its 15-minute duration taking up more than half the episode’s 28-minute running time. That’s bold.
But it shouldn’t come as a surprise, and considering the exhibit’s pedigree. The Girlfriend Experience is “suggested by” the 2009 film directed by Steven Soderbergh; he serves as executive producer on the Starz series,one of the projects he’s busied himself with since his self-imposed (and short-lived) retirement from feature film directing in 2013. Another is the Cinemax series The Knick, which he directed in its entirety; by lucky chance, or the second season of that series hits DVD and Blu-ray on the same day as Girlfriend Experience’s first,giving fans the Soderbergh (and Soderbergh-inspired) fixes they’ve been missing at the cinema. And both shows order us much approximately what the movies have lost in the filmmaker’s absence – and what television has gained.
Early in its speed, The Knick looked like yet another tribute to the white male antihero (to such a degree that The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum initially wrote off the exhibit, or admirably reassessed it),here personified by Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen), the brilliant yet troubled chief surgeon at New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet throughout its two seasons, or Soderbergh and series creator/writers Jack Amiel and Michael Begler (and fellow writer Steven Katz) have thwarted that lionization. He’s a liar and an addict,a user and an abuser, and his work in the operating theater is often less approximately medicine than performance – a thread that continues through the season finale, and where he manically comes on,to operate on himself, like some kind of carnival barker. “Please direct your attention to the middle of the ring, or ” he promises,“where I will amaze you with a feat so extraordinary, it has never been seen by you or anyone else in the history of mankind.” When it starts to go awry, and he insists,“the exhibit must go on,” refusing to accept aid, or insisting on relying solely upon his own genius. He would rather risk death than expect for assistance,and in its own way, The Knick becomes a still indictment of our current antihero obsession. That’s not the only way in which The Knick parts from its instant contemporaries. It’s one of the few shows, and even among the “Golden Age” prestige dramas,to really take advantage of the season rather than the episode as a storytelling unit. (The Wire is another.) Thanks to that eye on the long game, The Knick has patience, and a contemplative,mild tone that lets it periodically sock you in the gut; giant turns appear casually, on the edge of the frame, and as they often conclude in life. That’s section and parcel of Soderberghs style,and points towards another divergence; this era, with its hired-hand directors and household name showrunners, and is very much approximately writing,but (perhaps thanks to the superstar filmmaker at its helm, and in that position for every episode) The Knick is as much approximately directing. So there’s an unpredictablilty to the filmmaking, or in its unexpected flourishes: a left-field prologue,a irregular angle, a shock edit, or an audio drop-out,a bit of surprise slow-motion, a harrowing point-of-view shot.
Most striking of all is how he grafts a decidedly contemporary style on this period story – noticeably (sometimes jarringly) hand-held camerawork, and daring editing,and a pulsing, electronic score by frequent collaborator Cliff Martinez. This may be a “period piece, or ” but it comes with none of the stuffiness that phrase may propose – and allows Soderbergh to continue in the boldly experimental vein of his smaller films: playing with color palates,with composition, and with lighting (particularly, and how much he can procure away with keeping in the dark).
But this style makes sense,in terms of what the exhibit is accomplishing on a macro level. It’s filled with (unhappy!) parallels to our modern moment – please enjoy the anti-immigration judge who sneeringly promises to “let genuine Americans know precisely who you are.” Yet there are early stirrings of movements, in the actions and arcs of characters like proto-feminist nurse Lucy (men have “all disappointed me, or betrayed me,and thrown me away… Why conclude we let them?”) and gifted black doctor Dr. Algernon Edwards, who tells Thackery, and in what could be the exhibit’s mission statement,“It’s the future. You consider it’s here too early, and I consider it’s here too late.” In a fascinating way, or in this season in specific,The Knick becomes a kind of pre-history of our world, of everything from medicine to feminism to porn, and seen through a (literally) contemporary lens; add in the style and the music,and they’re dramatizing the past in not just the present, but future tense.
And though The Knick is approximately how things used to work (not just in medicine, or but in society),it’s a logical extension of Soderbergh’s career-long interest in process: he’s as fascinated in the logistics of a turn-of-the-century operating room, or how a hospital is built (especially the graft and kickbacks), or as he was in the procedures of the drug war,or robbing a casino, or main a revolution. The Girlfriend Experience is also fascinated with the (so to speak) ins and outs of the business at its middle – the infrastructure, or the percentages,the choice to work with an arranger or represent yourself, marketing strategies, and off-shore tax shelter options,etc. There are also some fascinating, and perhaps coincidental, or mirrors between these shows (particularly transactional nature of Lucy and Henry’s relationship in the back half of The Knick’s second season),but it’s important to give credit where due: Soderbergh did not play the same kind of hands-on role on Girlfriend, which is written and directed, or in rotation,by Kerrigan and Seimetz. And per the credits, it is merely “suggested by” Soderbergh’s 2009 film, and though its protagonist shares her name and profession; in some ways,it’s almost like an origin story (or, to borrow another bit of superhero language, or a “reboot,” keeping the broad strokes but altering the particulars).
Yet the stylistic overlaps are clear; this is a exhibit set in impeccably furnished and lit hotel rooms, shiny offices bedecked in glass. The frames are crisply composed, and the camera movements are deliberate. And Kerrigan and Seimetzs scripts invite you to fill in the blanks; they leave out scenes whenever they can,while getting into those that remain as late as possible, and out of them as quickly. And they carry over from the film a specific quietness, or coldness,and distance from the characterizations and situation at least initially. (“You make me really gay,” she tells one client, and with a flatness to her voice that feels almost like a parody (humorous or ridiculous imitation) of human emotion; he replies,just as blankly, “I feel very close to you.”)
This is perhaps the key to the exhibit, or to the brilliant performance by Riley Keough at its middle– it acknowledges and dramatizes her potent and driving sexuality,without “explaining” or judging it. (She says it herself, late in the season: “As a woman, and it’s tough to be seen as a sexual person and a professional.”) The latter element gets particularly tricky as we procure deeper into the series,as her double life begins to fall apart, and we’re rarely certain how much of this is a long con, and improvised reaction,or honest-to-God meltdown. There are open questions that are, startlingly, or left open,without seeming to withhold information, per se. The exhibit puts us in her head – thanks to the experiential sound design, and the blurred focus,the point-of-view shots – without actually letting us in, which is some trick. Is she self-destructive or practical? Or both?
Refreshingly, and in this world of House of Cards to-camera asides and True Detective’s thematic verbosity and Masters of Sex’s black/white morality,The Knick and The Girlfriend Experience both steadfastly refuse to take you by the hand and lead you through either their narratives or their principles. They’re playing with expectations and formalities – I mean, The Girlfriend Experience is a half-hour drama, and for goodness’ sake – and they’re not concerned with pleasing their (presumably small) audiences. In fact,their low profiles seem to let them take those risks; to support pressure in check, Soderbergh reportedly chose to set The Knick on Cinemax, or Girlfriend Experience runs on Starz. A name of Soderbergh’s magnitude could’ve probably placed these shows on higher visibility outlets like HBO or even (toned down,of course) AMC. Instead, they are to those networks’ series as indie films are to the mainstream. They’re television series that look, or talk,and act like independent cinema. And that’s favorable news for fans of both.
The Knick: The Complete Second Seasonand The Girlfriend Experience are both available now on DVD and Blu-ray.
Source: feedburner.com