"When you commit yourself to a character," Sasha Grey recently told Movieline, "you really don't know what's going to happen until that exact moment or that exact scene." Maybe so, but in the adult-film actress's mainstream debut The Girlfriend Experience -- directed with cool, affectless precision by Steven Soderbergh -- your educated guesses probably wouldn't be that far off.
Grey stars as Christine, who in turn appears as Chelsea, a high-priced escort experiencing a bit of a professional lag. Her customers bring increasing amounts of recession-era angst to their sessions; her four-figure hourly fee has provided well for her, but she uneasily strives from a plateau where she watches the competition swirl around her. Her boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) isn't faring much better at the gym where he works (for now) as a personal trainer. Their respective hustles -- Christine flirts with the ubiquity of the Web, Chris enacts power grabs with clients and employers alike -- bleed into their own relationship, which is psychosexually fraught enough in the first place.
None of the above happens in any particular order, or with any particular emphasis by Soderbergh himself; despite his nonlinear plot (if you can even call it that), his 77-minute minifeature has the texture and dimension of a windowpane. And one definitely feels like he/she is watching the principals, whether through glass, across a dining room, or invited as a third party to witness what unfold as a series increasingly bleak, stony negotiations. Even the most optimistic among them -- between Christine and the only man in the film who makes her laugh -- deteriorates into futility. And for once, she breaks.
But while Christine's emotional breaches are rare, her vulnerability is not. She's not so unlike the older factory worker in Bubble -- Soderbergh's previous experimentally tinged HD effort -- whose disadvantage in a love triangle drives her to distraction (and worse). Christine seems perpetually on the defensive, even when on the offensive. Grey occupies that schism with a discipline matching her director's, and it's true, she doesn't necessarily look like she's doing anything in particular. But Soderbergh sprinkles in context clues directly playing off her range (the last scene is especially revelatory), and while her performance never achieves anything like the spontaneity alluded to at the top of this review, she's no sphinx.
Gimmick-hunters will be disappointed to find no sex or even any real sexiness in Girlfriend Experience. In fact, as the emotional economy follows the fiscal variety into the crapper, the overriding feeling is actually one of pronounced unsexiness. It's a testament to Soderbergh's imagination that Sasha Grey can emerge, even for 77 minutes, as the smoky-eyed face of American existential crisis. All Grey has to do now is make it to the next scene. Here's hoping. RATING (out of 10): 7