"I went to a place to eat. It said 'breakfast at any time.' So I ordered french toast during the Renaissance". --Steven Wright ... If you are a devotee of time travel, check out this song...

Wednesday, May 5, 2021

The Girlfriend Experience 3.1-2: Intertwining Desires



Well, The Girlfriend Experience is back on Starz for a third season, and of course I had to watch it.  Not for the reasons you think.  Well, maybe it is for those reasons, though I don't know you, and you don't me, so guessing at reasons is always a risk.  Ok, I liked the first two seasons for two reasons, the obvious one, and I also liked the stories.

But let me start by saying I liked the first season a lot more than the second season, whatever I may have said at the time I saw them (see links to my reviews at the end of this review).  I thought the first season was a strong, more unified story than either of the two parallel stories in the second second.  And, so far, I'm liking the third season as much as the first season.

There are some obvious, cliched parts, though.  I've seen narratives on television devoted towards perfecting a dating app at least twice in the past year, and have even been quoted as saying these kinds of coincidences are not coincidences in the usual sense of the word, but are either an expression of Hegel's spirit of age or a result of industrial espionage in the movie/television business.  So Iris leaving a PhD program in the U. S. to work at a company in the U.K. devoted to discovering and encoding why people are attracted to one another is fun enough to see, but so far not all that original.

The other part of Iris's life, though, joining "V" to give men "the girlfriend" experience, is more original and assisted by Iris played by The Affair's Julia Goldani Telles who looks and acts just fine.  Telles in the first episodes projects a complex persona comprised in almost equal measure of vulnerability and confidence.  The fact that, in this story, Iris's day and night jobs both draw on the same body of knowledge (apologies for the pun) works very well.  In both jobs, Iris needs to discover what men like and want, and parlay that into different kinds but related dividends.

It will be good to see where these stories go, and I'll be back here with reviews.

See also  The Girlfriend Experience 2.1-2: Two for One ...  The Girlfriend Experience 2.3-4: Hard to Come By ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.5-6: In and Out ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.7-8: Sundry Seductions ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.9-10: The End of Illusions ... The Girlfriend Experience 2.11-12; One and One Is Less than One

And see also The Girlfriend Experience: Eminently Worth It (my review of Season 1)

 

It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...


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