The Girlfriend Experience 2.13-14: One and One is Less than One

The Girlfriend Experience just concluded it's oddly double season tonight on Starz.

Erica and Anna end up both prone, but not together.  Erica's on the floor of some kind of building, utterly distraught and drunk, her life falling apart, her last defense gone, as the FBI has a recording proving she was lying.  Anna's on a bed on her back pretending to sleep, as a john takes off her high heels.   You could say Erica has gotten her just desert, after what she did to Anna, and Anna's doing what she loves.  But, still, it was sad to see.

Over in the Bria story we get, maybe, a better ending for her.  But it's not what she imagined when she's at the side of the lake, her white outfit suitably soaked in blood.  Because although she killed the bad guys, it's not at all clear what Ian and the authorities will now do to her.   Still, unlike Erica, at least Bria has a fighting chance.

Bria's story was always stronger than Erica and Anna's, but even Bria's wasn't as good as the first season of The Girlfriend Experience.  And two stories are not the kind of thing you can add together and say they're better than one, unless each or at least one of them is better than the one you're comparing them to.  (Same for the performances of Anna Friel and Louisa Krause and Carmen Ejogo, which were all good, but not as good as Riley Keough's in the first season. But the comparison is also apples and oranges, because the season 2 acting had much less screen time than first.)

So, although I'd watch another season of The Girlfriend Experience, and admire the outrageous chances it takes and the style with which it shows us all of this, I'd recommend and hope that a third season returns to a single, more focused story.

 

It 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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