TV Review: THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE: Season 3, Episodes 1-2: [Starz, SXSW 2021]

The Girlfriend Experience Season 3 Episodes 1-2 Review

The Girlfriend Experience: Season 3, Episode 1: Mirrors, and Episode 2: Everyone’s Got a Price, premiered this past week at the 28th Annual South By Southwest Film Festival, signaling the return of the Starz cable series after a three-year absence. Once again inspired by the 2009 film of the same name directed by Steven Soderbergh (who serves as one of the show’s executive producers) and once again reinventing itself with a whole new cast of characters, this season sees Anja Marquardt taking over the showrunner reins from her predecessors Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz and moving the primary setting across the pond.

The first episode opens in the sterile white brightness of an empty VR space, with New Yorker Iris (Julia Goldani Telles) accepting the proposition of a test-run rendezvous with a high-end escort company in London, known only as The V. While she craves intimacy in her personal relationships she also admires temporality and distance, and thus a glamorous escort gig seems like the perfect fit – especially as she also adjusts to the expensive life of working at a tech start-up in a new country. The latter is a good excuse to persuade her mom (Jemima Rooper) to let her drop out of her Ivy-League grad-school pursuit of a neuroscience degree, even though she might just be wanting some quicker money to help provide care for her dad’s onsetting Alzheimer’s.

Once in London, Iris is developing new AI programming at her tech job by day and attending classy restaurants with clients at night, documenting her interactions with them for personal and professional reference.

The second episode starts the morning after the night with her first client, Paul, a quiet and submissive man. His glowing review puts her in immediate good standing at the V, and her mysterious recruiter (Talisa Garcia) begins to feed her more clients– including high-profile public figures like the entrepreneur Georges (Oliver Masucci). Meanwhile at her day job, Iris grows irritated of her bosses’ combo of cut-throat business, mild chauvinism, and New Age platitudes of positivity (which one of her co-workers jokes is a result of their “microdosing”). However, she hits it off with Hiram (Armin Karima) and combines her theories on the humans’ tendencies of emotional intimacy via facial expressions with Hiram’s data on physical attraction to create a romantic pairing interface using intricate artificial intelligence.

While Iris and Hiram’s pitch to their boss (Daniel Betts) allows them access to even more data from various mining firms, they hit a snag on their inputs. The episode ends suggesting that Iris might use her own documentation of her clienteles’ sensibilities to add more first-hand depth to the project going forward.

Marquardt’s writing and direction is cool and glossy, like the blue-grey tint of London’s shimmering skyscraper and Iris’ clients’ luxury apartments. Telles’ performance is one of intense control with a tinge of ennui, which gives Iris a sultry sense of determination. Combined with the show’s tech world setting, the dreamy ambience of Matthew Pusti’s score, and the purposefully jarring cuts in Nick Carew’s editing – dialogued overlayed on shots with no talking in antithetical shot-reverse shot fashion suggesting the non-verbal connections of a digital space, or even something as simple as a glitch – Marquardt conjures up a prime techno-erotic-thriller atmosphere. It’s as slick as it is engrossing but there’s also this ever-present sense of danger, as if Iris is about to tap into something much bigger than she’s capable of controlling. It’s got those sexy sci-fi vibes akin to Ex Machina but without Garland’s overt sexism posing as a techbro’s guide to feminism. (Whether the rest of the series maintains those stylistic and thematic suggestions remains to be seen.)

What’s even more impressive is its down-to-earth approach despite its fantastical suggestions. Juxtaposing Iris’ escorting business with the moments between her start-up co-workers is not meant to preface future office romance, but rather that compartmentalization allows it borders on hard scientific analysis of sociological phenomenon with its technical jargon unhindered. Yet that never feels like it clashes with the escorting sequences, mainly because of Telles’ ability to adapt her coolness appropriately across both realms.

Season 3 of The Girlfriend Experience is off to an eye-catching start and, for an uninitiated viewer like myself, makes me all the more curious about its past seasons as well as Soderbergh’s watershed film. But like with most good Soderbergh-adjacent work, that want is to be expected

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