The Girlfriend Experience

Call me: Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience

Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring Sasha Grey, Chris Santos 16 cert, Queen’s, Belfast; IFI/Light House, Dublin, 77 min

THERE IS any number of reasons – among them Full Frontaland Bubble– to approach Steven Soderbergh's more experimental projects with deepest suspicion. Too often the structures employed in developing the films are more interesting than the entities themselves.

Indeed, most of the writing on Bubblefocused on how the film was being distributed.

If you know anything about The Girlfriend Experience, you probably know that it stars an actor who, to date, has worked only in pornographic films. In one of Soderbergh's trademark ironies, Sasha Grey remains the most experienced performer in the cast.

Grey plays a high-class call girl who, for that extra bit of cash, offers the full relationship package: the Girlfriend Experience of the title. Only she can know if this constitutes a step up or a step down in prestige.

Further cleverness greets us when we consider the plot. Grey’s character, Chelsea, lives with a chap who works as a personal trainer at an upmarket gym. So, in a sense, both people make a living by servicing the bodies of rich Manhattanites.

The Girlfriend Experienceplays itself out during the 2008 presidential election, and all kinds of parallels are implied between the morality of the politician and the morality of the prostitute.

It sounds unbearable and, sure enough, the picture spends too much time peering up its own orifices. Grey’s numb performance is barely passable, and the video gleam irritates quickly.

It cannot, however, be denied that the choking, nauseating atmosphere – fetid with the fug of toxic money and shallow ambitions – is impressively sustained. Soderbergh has never been the cheeriest of directors, but the universe he creates here has been so desiccated by bad faith that you feel your skin flaking from moral dehydration.

The Girlfriend Experienceis not much fun, you understand. Certainly not as much fun as the director's recent, underrated The Informant! Nonetheless, unlike Bubbleand Full Frontal, it does feel like a real film with something akin to a formal structure.

Anyway, even if you hate the thing, it’s over in less than 80 minutes. Not too painful.