Like nearly everything else in This Girl's Life, protagonist and sex worker Juliette Marquis is several degrees over the top. She's not merely a hooker with a heart of gold; she's also gorgeous, brilliant, charming, tender, free of drugs and diseases and hang-ups, liberated, sex-positive, shy, and innocent. She loves her work, she never fakes an orgasm, she's gently understanding with people who look down on her profession, and she's saintly in her devotion to her widowed father (James Woods), a horrifically debilitated Parkinson's victim whose ass she wipes without complaint. No wonder she's the Internet's first and biggest porn star: The way writer-director Ash frames her, it's a wonder she's not the first female president, too.
Marquis is the vibrant center of a film that desperately needs a more solid one. Half of This Girl's Life simply explores her world in graphic, exploitative, and wandering detail, as she gets naked, has sex, watches other people have sex, has more sex, and converses candidly with the camera about how wonderful it all is. Eventually, a plot of sorts kicks in, as Marquis agrees to seduce a friend's would-be fiancé to find out whether he's capable of monogamy. This leads her to hire herself out as a "sex investigator," which leads her to trouble, which leads nowhere. Given that half the movie is a paean to sexual freedom, the later scenes showing the other side of the coin feel tacked-on, especially since they stop short of condemning or punishing Marquis for her choices.
But the movie stops short of everything else, too: No conclusions are reached, and none of the trailing storylines get resolved. Some films might make this open-endedness seem naturalistic, but This Girl's Life remains far too artificial and gimmicky to make the idea work. Ash's first film, Bang, had much the same focused but uncontrolled feel, and much the same feeling of distracted worship aimed at its female star. The writer-director possesses an innate talent for depicting the intimacy of both sex and violence, and for getting the most out of actors: Woods is tremendously believable in the sort of showy disease-victim role that wins Oscars in more responsible films, and Michael Rapaport is terrifying and nauseating as one of Marquis' marks. Marquis herself rarely comes off as less than fascinating, in spite of her cheaply titillating material. Taken on their own, many segments of This Girl's Life feel intensely powerful, but they don't add up to anything coherent, apart from a softcore morality tale that never gets around to finding a moral.