Vancouver filmmaker Ileana Pietrobruno’s Girlfriend Experience is intriguing in its approach to the realities of sex workers´ clients. This mock documentary centres on a man addicted to prostitutes even though he has a girlfriend. The film follows him as he cruises for girls, and when he gets obsessed with a certain girl complications ensue. His relationship is interspersed with sound bites from anonymous johns who also long for girlfriend-like qualities to their paid-sex exchanges.

Gallery: Paid Intimacy

¨¨Q: What drew you to explore client characteristics in sex-work relationships in your film Girlfriend Experience?
A: Vancouver has a large prostitution scene. We have the longest track, or "stroll," in the world – Kingsway Street. So there’s always lots of talk in the media about how to either protect or save the prostitute, the woman. But no one ever talks about the guys – the men who pay for sex. While the female sex worker is scrutinized and analyzed, the male client remains cloaked in secrecy, unknown and unseen. As a filmmaker, I simply wanted to reveal what is hidden: the client. The film references the idea that the client is unknown and unseen with interviews that have him turned away, with his back is to camera. The client is faceless.

Q: As you did some interviews with sex-trade clients, what did you discover the men were saying that informed your film?
A: What struck me more than the details of their stories is what regular guys they are. Sure, some of them are super kinky, but still, they’re just regular guys – dads, husbands, brothers, boyfriends, buddies, sons. Very nice guys. Because I did not want to vilify or stereotype the client, I decided that in both the writing and dramatization of Girlfriend Experience, the client had to be "the guy next door". Daniel (played by David Lewis) is good-looking, white, middle-class (in a lousy low-wage job), and he’s in love with his girlfriend. Daniel is a generic guy, somewhat bland, who just happens to be obsessed with prostitutes.

The john is typically characterized as a sinister shadow lurking in the alleyways and underbelly of the city. In Girlfriend Experience the john is shot with reflections of the city to emphasize that he is right here in the centre of the city, everywhere and everyman. The john is the city.

Conducting the research interviews, I was surprised to learn about the "girlfriend experience." GFE is a service that offers deep French kissing, bareback blow jobs and full sex; in other words, closeness and intimacy. It’s not so much the sex men are after, as the feeling of being with a girlfriend. Men are hungry for a sexual encounter that feels comfortable, unrushed, friendly, warm, connected, intimate, and most importantly, real – like she’s your girlfriend and you’re her boyfriend. A GFE date must not feel like a paid session. It has to feel like she is really into it. That she likes you, genuinely likes you.

GFE surprised me. If I were purchasing sex, I would not be paying for cuddles and soft kisses; I’d be paying for new physical experiences, without emotional intimacy. I had not expected Girlfriend Experience to be an investigation of the fantasy of love, but as this emotion was so prevalent in my research, it became an important part of the film.

Q: How do you think you’re approaching the GFE fantasy in your film?
A: I am interpreting the GFE as being about the quest for realness and authenticity. Why does Daniel pay for sex when he can get it for free? Subconsciously, Daniel feels that prostitutes are more real than non-professional women. When he can make the prostitute Adrian orgasm he knows, not simply that she likes him more than all the other men she’s slept with, but more importantly, that he has broken through the facade of the whore to the real woman.

For Daniel, Adrian is genuine and real. To convey this idea, the film associates her with nature – trees, grass, rain, the sounds of birds and wind. Daniel wants to feel connected. His voice is recorded so that it has a quality of intimacy and closeness. The occasional – and intentional – microphone interference adds to his physicality and vulnerability, as does his nudity. Imbuing his voice with an intimate quality also ironically conveys his loneliness and sadness. Although Daniel longs for connection, he experiences alienation and isolation.

Q: What do you think of the faux-documentary approach you’re using in the film?
A: What fascinates me about GFE is how the client can fully enjoy the illusion of realness while still being fully aware that it is fake. This knowledge does not detract from the illusion. When the prostitute Adrian says, “I love you,” Daniel knows that, “It’s bullshit, but who cares? GFE makes us feel good.” I admire that kind of imaginative complexity.

Similarly, Girlfriend Experience’s faux-doc style does not try to be convincingly real. The documentary codes flirt with the audience, teasing and taunting with the charade of realism. Like the GFE provider and buyer, the filmmaker and viewer are conscious of the documentary’s simulation of authenticity. Both the GFE client and the Girlfriend Experience viewer are complicit in this entanglement of illusion and reality – and hopefully enjoying it. The viewer’s engagement in the film’s faux-doc style parallels the client’s experience of the GFE.

Q: How do you see your character Daniel and the compulsiveness of his actions?
A: Because a dramatic story needs conflict, tension and things that go wrong, I scripted problems into the main character’s enjoyment of prostitution. For the sake of telling a story, I had to have Daniel encounter obstacles in his pursuit of the GFE. I believe that in reality most men find that prostitution works very well for them.

Daniel’s compulsiveness or obsession with prostitution is not simply motivated by the fact that he can’t get what he wants. It’s also because sex itself isn’t actually about sex at all. Daniel thinks that all he’s searching for is a good fuck – but what’s a good fuck?

What is sex? People think I’m an idiot when I ask this question, but really, what is sex? I don’t think that it’s about penetration or any specific physical act. To me, sex is about illusion and fantasy.

This is why Girlfriend Experience never shows the physical act of sex, because that’s not what sex is about. Sex is about everything that leads up to it, and everything that follows afterwards. Sex is about desire, longing, hunger, anticipation, cruising, searching. And then the feelings afterwards, whatever those may be. In Daniel’s case, he often feels empty, lost and unsatisfied, which is why he needs to search again for what he believes will make him feel whole.

In this consumerist age, we all experience and understand this kind of obsession. Our addictions come in a variety of forms and intensities. Searching externally for an internal sense of well-being is what our consumer culture is all about. For Daniel, having lots of sex with lots of different women makes him feel alive. Without it he would be a useless shell of a man. As he says, “It’s only sex, but it’s the most important thing in a guy’s life.”

Q: Daniel is obsessed with a prostitute he assumes is named Adrian. It’s interesting that in much erotic imagery the female form is highly visible. What do you think occurs when you obscure the face and voice of his paid muse?
A: During the shoot, I was really worried that my decision not to reveal the prostitute Adrian’s face or voice would end up being a grave mistake. I knew that I was taking a big risk.

I hid Adrian’s face by either placing her outside of frame or by obstructing our gaze with large objects in the foreground. Both techniques create tension because the viewer’s longing to see Adrian’s face, or to understand her, is constantly thwarted.

I intentionally wanted Adrian to be non-existent, in order to emphasize that the prostitute does not exist. What exists is the client and his desires. Prostitution is about male sexuality, not female sexuality. It’s all about the guy, not about the girl. I wanted to emphasize that Adrian is unknown and unknowable; anything that Daniel says about her is his own projection. Adrian is merely a screen onto which Daniel projects his own beliefs, ideas, feelings and needs.

The first rough-cut screenings did not include the re-enactment scenes (which I shot later), so Adrian really was non-existent – no face, no voice. Surprisingly, the audiences in those first test screenings had absolutely no problem interpreting Adrian as a rounded character, even though she isn’t a character at all. I find it really weird how much meaning audiences take from Adrian.

Q: Daniel has early lines in the film saying he likes prostitution because there’s no games. Yet the dynamics of his GFE seem just as complicated and complicating to his girlfriend Maddy. Have you thought of how how so-called GFE processes differ from more conventional relationships?
A: Purchasing a half-hour or one-hour girlfriend experience session is completely different from having an actual, everyday girlfriend. That’s obvious. A GFE session is a circumscribed scene in which the participants are actors playing the roles of girlfriend and boyfriend. By participating in prostitution, Daniel can star in his own movie with a script that he’s written. The film’s use of re-enactments dramatizes the idea that what we are watching is his fantasy, his perspective.

A GFE session is uncomplicated. When the GFE date is over, Daniel says, “I leave the theatre both physically and emotionally.” But later on, Daniel decides to step right into the fantasy and that’s when things get complicated for him. He wants to be inside the fantasy because it makes Adrian’s kisses that much sweeter.

When Daniel steps into the fantasy, he soon finds himself paying for nothing. He is quite literally paying to masturbate. Does he get nothing in return because Adrian is a fantasy who does not exist? Does he get nothing in return because his desire depends on never being satisfied? Is paying to jerk off to a fantasy and never being satisfied a graphic metaphor for prostitution?

Q: You spoke to some johns about their experience. Did you choreograph Daniel’s sexualized re-enactments from what you’ve heard?
A: I wrote all the lines and all the scenes. The film is all scripted. Nothing is improvised. It’s a testament to David Lewis’s talent and skill as an actor that viewers often believe that the character Daniel is actually a john who is simply ad libbing lines. He’s not. David Lewis’s lines are scripted, rehearsed and memorized.

So the answer to your question is no. I did not choreograph re-enactments based on what I heard. The interviews that I conducted inspired my writing but everything is made up. David Lewis’s naturalistic acting and John Houtman’s exquisitely "accidental and spontaneous" cinematography both work to dupe the audience into believing that there’s something real going on here. There isn’t. It’s a movie, very manipulated and worked over.

Q: How do you think Adrian experiences the GFE concept, differently from Daniel?
A: I wasn’t thinking at all about what Adrian was thinking because she doesn’t exist. She is a pair of red shoes and a purple scarf. She is a prop. A prop onto which Daniel hangs his desire, imagination, anxiety, hope, eroticism, love, fear. Actually, Adrian is a cinematic trope – the mysterious woman. When Daniel rifles through her purse, hoping to learn her identity, he finds nothing. At the end of the movie, Adrian reveals that her name is actually Nana. This name is a reference to Émile Zola’s 1880 literary masterpiece, Nana. Zola’s depiction of the courtesan would become the archetypal prostitute of contemporary Western culture. To me, Adrian/Nana isn’t a sex worker: she is a cultural artifact or symbol.

Q: Did you also speak to sex workers about GFE fantasy, whether their understanding of this differs?
A: I have acquaintances who work in the sex industry. (And I must point out that they are all very accomplished, educated and intelligent women who make this profession work for them.) But no, I did not talk to them about this project because I tend to keep my filmmaking separate from my friendships, and also because I felt that I did not need or want their input as sex workers. First off, because the film is not about sex workers. But more importantly, the way I see it, all women are whores, myself included. It’s not hard for me to imagine what it’s like to manipulate a man into believing that I find him attractive and interesting ´cause like, uh, duh – isn’t this what we women do all the time? It’s called survival.

Q: What is it like to depict variously the simulation of intimacy and romance in a paid-sex context?
A: Directing so-called sex scenes (in which there is a simulation of physical intimacy) is always tricky. Cast and crew tend to get awkward and stiff around nudity and physical contact.

I think executing a sex scene requires a lot of communication. I always decide with the actors what exactly the actions are going to be. I also make sure that the actors know that their boundaries will be fully respected. On this shoot, I made a deal with the actors that they were free to change their mind at anytime, even if we were halfway through their scene. In other words, they were at liberty to renege on a shoot midway, causing us to lose a full day’s work. Fortunately, this never happened but perhaps the actors’ affirmed autonomy made them much more relaxed.

What’s interesting about the representation of intimacy in Girlfriend Experience is that it has a tone of criminality. One reason for this is that the viewer brings so many personal and cultural biases to the depiction of paid sex. Simply portraying a john elicits a feeling of tension in the viewer. Daniel’s intimacy with sex workers is layered with the viewer’s perceptions of power and exploitation.

The other reason for this tone of criminality stems from Girlfriend Experience’s shooting style, which is very voyeuristic. The camera peers through obstructions trying to see the action, like a voyeur who watches illicitly from a hidden place. There’s an insidious feeling of guilt, shame and complicity. When the cop yells at the camera to shut off, it is as if the camera has been caught or censored. Just as Daniel is criminalized for what he does, so too is the camera.

Q: What do you think of the sense of erotic illusion in the narrative? The perception that sex work commonly involves deception?
A: The GFE service’s mutually agreed upon deception intrigues me. The client knowingly and willingly pays to be duped into believing that the sex worker is turned on. In spite of being fully aware that the sex worker’s orgasms are fake, most johns fully enjoy their erotic encounter. Some johns delude themselves into believing that the sex worker’s orgasms are real. In both cases, the client is paying the sex worker to be a very good actress.

Daniel sees GFE as a consensual illusion. He believes that prostitution is more honest than going on a regular date, because with a sex worker the terms of the interaction are discussed openly and he doesn’t have to manipulate her with courtship games or false intentions just to get her in bed. Daniel isn’t ashamed of what he does because it’s honest. That’s why he’s not in the closet.

Q: Was it interesting to conceive of a male character’s motivation to experience physical variety – that he wants girls on the side, even as he has an attractive girlfriend?
A: Paid sex doesn’t threaten Daniel’s relationship with Maddy in the way that an affair could. The boundaries of paid sex are clear: once the date is over, it’s over. Emotions are kept in check. For this reason, prostitution does not threaten monogamy. It could even be argued that prostitution protects marriages from breaking apart.

Daniel needs to have lots of sex with lots of different women in order to feel like a man and prostitution affords him this opportunity. The world of prostitution also bonds him with other men. He likes to imagine that his sexuality is as base, simple, uncomplicated and cliché as any other regular guy. By participating in prostitution, Daniel constructs his idea of what it is to be a man.

Q: I don’t think the film moralizes Daniel’s process, yet how do you see this drive in the character – how some men are eroticizing themselves in this way?

A: Daniel is a character that I created, therefore, he is me. I want the audience to understand him and sympathize with him. One audience member, surprised to learn that I am the writer and director, said, “But it feels like a guy made it.” That is the ultimate compliment because it is the entire point of the film. Girlfriend Experience is about the client’s point of view.

That’s one of the reasons that I’ve changed my name in the head credits to Pietro Bruno. I also gave myself this masculine name because I was worried that a lot of male viewers might immediately get defensive over a woman directing a film about prostitution. They might automatically assume that I’ll be negative and moralistic.

For most men, prostitution works; for some it doesn’t. A few men feel dehumanized by it. Daniel believes that the prostitute holds all the power, because she has what he wants and she can withhold it from him. And furthermore, she’s the one that’s making money. He feels used by her. He wonders, "Who’s exploiting who exactly?"

One of the things that struck me when I was talking to johns about their hobbying is how ashamed they are of what they do and how much they stand to lose if they get caught. The can lose their friends, family and job. For many, I was the first person that they had ever talked to about this part of their life.

Q: There’s a point in the film when Daniel proclaims, "My name is not ´John´" and that he likes prostitution because it’s honest. Yet there’s a reference to his obsession as junk food. What do you think of the contradictions in the desiring in the film?
A: Daniel feeds his hunger but because the source of his hunger is unclear, he is never satiated. Yes, his desire is filled with contradictions. That’s why his sexual adventures both set him free and entrap him.

Q: How do you think working on this project and with GFE concepts has affected your generalized sense of sexuality and relations?
A: Having put myself inside Daniel’s head for so long, I’ve come to see that prostitution betrays a profound weakness in men: a vulnerability, an insatiable need to step out of boring mundane reality, a yearning to feel alive, a fear of aging and dying, a desire to connect. All the things that make us human and very interesting. Yeah, I don’t quite know why but now that I’ve made this film, I like men a lot more.

Trailer: Girlfriend Experience

Girlfriend Experience will be released on DVD, June 16

Louise Bak is a poet, with books including Tulpa and Gingko Kitchen. She co-hosts Sex City, Toronto’s only radio show focused on relations between sexuality and culture (CIUT 89.5 FM). Her performance work has appeared in numerous spaces and in video collaborations such as Partial Selves and Crimes of the Heart.