Just aired on BBC 2 and available in the UK on BBC i-player for a week
Client 9 - The Call Girl and the Governor was directed by Oscar winner Alex Gibney, of
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Watch a
trailer. It's the story of Eliot Spitzer, the first Jewish President the US never had, campaigning lawyer who took on the mobsters ( eg. the Gambino family) and won, then as New York's Attorney General took on Wall Street's Masters of the Universe - and appeared to be winning. Elected New York State Governor, things started to unravel between Albany's Escher-esque State legislature and the cellar of Republican State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno's house, complete with heavy punch-bag. Bruno was friends with all kinds of, shall we say, resourceful but unforgiving people, some of whom included the grandiose Wall Street icons the abrasive and self-righteous Spitzer had recently enraged and who were still fulminating thunderously. Apart from the fact that we have wonderfully iconic cameos of masculinity in its middle and old-age, dark, furious, brooding and cynical against the fading light of its conflicting dreams and its dwindling capacity to carry them out without protheses, we have a dramatic and self-attributed display of hubris, as Spitzer was apparently addicted to sex with enormously expensive escorts and spent a small fortune on them (his own, however) over several years. When this was revealed in March 2008, he resigned, which of course meant that his whole staff complement, innocent of any offence, lost their jobs as well. The woman who took centre stage and revealed most of her mystique on the front pages of dozens of magazines including the doddering
Playboy in the affair, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, was far from being Spitzer's muse - it would appear that he only saw her on the odd occasion but that it unfortunately coincided with an authorised wiretap. She achieved specious celebrity and a short-lived pop-career from the affair, and now, suitably photographed with both business suit and gravitas-delivering spectacles, writes a relationship advice column "Ask Ashley" in the
New York Post. "Angelina", the girl that Spitzer actually most often saw over a long period, who declined to appear in the movie but allowed her very intelligent words to be spoken by an actress, has an even darker secret to hide: she's now a commodities trader. A rare and disturbing exploration of personal ambition, corporate power, sexuality, surveillance, hypocrisy, fraud, frailty, duplicity, violence, idealism, greed, revenge, overwheening arrogance and occasional reflection that might in the end be just more bathos anyway, everyone comes out of it badly and leaves us with the profundly depressing feeling that there's no-one you can trust and no-one ultimately has any boundaries. OK, we knew that anyway but being reminded of it is hardly uplifting. Nevertherless it's a revealing study of the connection between greed, power and sexuality that we rarely get outside fiction. And as one of the interviewees remarks, there's a culture specific aspect to this - had Spitzer "The Luv Gov" been a French politician he'd probably still be doing the job; almost certainly if he were Italian. As Hubert Waldroup, artist and procurer comments, we are all both animal and angel. On the evidence here it's animal, angel and idiot. Quel dommage.
Just aired on BBC 2 and available in the UK on BBC i-player for a week Client 9 - The Call Girl and the Governor was directed by Oscar winner Alex Gibney, of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Watch a trailer. It's the story of Eliot Spitzer, the first Jewish President the US never had, campaigning lawyer who took on the mobsters ( eg. the Gambino family) and won, then as New York's Attorney General took on Wall Street's Masters of the Universe - and appeared to be winning. Elected New York State Governor, things started to unravel between Albany's Escher-esque State legislature and the cellar of Republican State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno's house, complete with heavy punch-bag. Bruno was friends with all kinds of, shall we say, resourceful but unforgiving people, some of whom included the grandiose Wall Street icons the abrasive and self-righteous Spitzer had recently enraged and who were still fulminating thunderously. Apart from the fact that we have wonderfully iconic cameos of masculinity in its middle and old-age, dark, furious, brooding and cynical against the fading light of its conflicting dreams and its dwindling capacity to carry them out without protheses, we have a dramatic and self-attributed display of hubris, as Spitzer was apparently addicted to sex with enormously expensive escorts and spent a small fortune on them (his own, however) over several years. When this was revealed in March 2008, he resigned, which of course meant that his whole staff complement, innocent of any offence, lost their jobs as well. The woman who took centre stage and revealed most of her mystique on the front pages of dozens of magazines including the doddering Playboy in the affair, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, was far from being Spitzer's muse - it would appear that he only saw her on the odd occasion but that it unfortunately coincided with an authorised wiretap. She achieved specious celebrity and a short-lived pop-career from the affair, and now, suitably photographed with both business suit and gravitas-delivering spectacles, writes a relationship advice column "Ask Ashley" in the New York Post. "Angelina", the girl that Spitzer actually most often saw over a long period, who declined to appear in the movie but allowed her very intelligent words to be spoken by an actress, has an even darker secret to hide: she's now a commodities trader. A rare and disturbing exploration of personal ambition, corporate power, sexuality, surveillance, hypocrisy, fraud, frailty, duplicity, violence, idealism, greed, revenge, overwheening arrogance and occasional reflection that might in the end be just more bathos anyway, everyone comes out of it badly and leaves us with the profundly depressing feeling that there's no-one you can trust and no-one ultimately has any boundaries. OK, we knew that anyway but being reminded of it is hardly uplifting. Nevertherless it's a revealing study of the connection between greed, power and sexuality that we rarely get outside fiction. And as one of the interviewees remarks, there's a culture specific aspect to this - had Spitzer "The Luv Gov" been a French politician he'd probably still be doing the job; almost certainly if he were Italian. As Hubert Waldroup, artist and procurer comments, we are all both animal and angel. On the evidence here it's animal, angel and idiot. Quel dommage. 
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