What is to say, in a society in which the boundaries between intimacy and exploitation are uncertain; sex has become a commodity, but its real value is unstable.
The first half-hour or so of this beautifully structured movie moves along two narrative streams. In one, we see a man and a woman arriving in Las Vegas, capital of money-driven fakery and fantasy; in the other, flashbacks fill in the series of events that gave rise to this situation. Gradually we become aware of what a strange and delicate arrangement they have made with each other.
Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) is a twentysomething dot-com geek who has already made a fortune. His “centre of the world” is a bank of PCs at home, where work and leisure blur into one another. His array of screens includes one that shows stock prices rising and falling, and another streaming live images of a college girls’ locker room. The new ways of making money and the voyeurism that the Internet makes possible are linked; cold commerce and warm, wet bodies inhabit the same ambiguous space.
Richard meets a young woman called Florence (Molly Parker). She is a drummer in a band (in this context, a startlingly old-fashioned art form to be engaged in) but works as a lap-dancer to make a living. For her, there is already a gap between what she does in the way of self-realisation and what she has to do to make ends meet. She is alienated from her own desires.
Richard makes Florence a proposal that seems entirely natural to him, given the fact that his reality is pretty virtual: he offers her a large amount of money to accompany him to Las Vegas for three days. She sets up strict rules of engagement, but will they be sufficient to manage the complications that may arise between these two people? You can start to see the kinds of problems
that could develop. As Richard says, “We’re people, aren’t we? People have feelings.”
The script by Ellen Benjamin Wang and the camera work by Mauro Fiore are equally vital players in the telling of this ultimately disturbing story. The script is casually naturalistic, and the more elegant for it; the cinematography makes full use of the advantages of digital camera without seeming too flashy. The movie holds one’s interest mercilessly with the most apparently simple of devices — the friction of two characters.
Sarsgaard’s performance is gentle and subtle, provoking and maintaining our sympathy, despite, oddly, the criticisms one could make of Richard as a person, his willingness to believe in the efficacy — and the innocence — of financial transactions. A fascinating dual perspective is set up by the fact that the script is by a woman, yet the male point of view seems focal — Florence is very much the antagonist and is more of an enigma, less fleshed out. Yet that works to increase her power as a symbolic figure and as a character. Her “centre of the world” is a very different one to Richard’s.
Reading The Center of the World, as I have done, as a deconstruction of capitalism perhaps does it a disservice when it is essentially a riveting human drama, made with consummate skill and perception. And it does ask more questions than it answers, questions about whether a financial relationship necessarily corrupts human interactions, and, to be fair, one has to ask whether the cash nexus is central or incidental to the story. But it’s that kind of film — provocative, open to multiple readings. And it’s not often you see a movie largely about sex and come out feeling like a Marxist revolutionary.