Professional johns review "The Girlfriend Experience"

No matter how you slice it, Sasha Grey comes out the winner regardless of how Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” is reviewed. Shot on the newish, ultra-lightweight red digital cameras, the film looks beautiful and Grey has done what many porn performers have done before – play a sex worker of some kind in a mainstream movie – except not as a punchline.

I went to the Erotic Review, the top site for rankings of “service providers,” and found uniformly scathing reviews of the movie.

“There’s not one interesting character in the film,” one reviewer said, “cold and soulless,” said another. Another reviewer speculated that Soderbergh used Grey as the best marketing possible for a movie he knew would be small – it was released in theatres, cable, and on VOD the same day.

Set in the financial meltdown, pre-election Fall of 2008 (this movie was released faster than most Vivid films), “The Girlfriend Experience” devotes a lot of its script to discussions about money – negotiations for more or less of it, the fear of losing it, the quest for more of it.

So, even if the movie tanks, Sasha Grey has made out in the transaction.

There are no explicit sex scenes in the movie, Grey’s eyebrows look great (or are a distraction) and the whole movie serves as an excellent addition to Grey’s promo reel. It doesn’t matter if the movie tanks; Grey has taken a step up by association. In fact, it is as if Grey’s cold, soulless character is a human manifestation of the sentient planet in Soderbergh’s “Solaris.”

• Watch “The Girlfriend Experience” now

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Sasha Grey – the end of innocence; Throat – A Cautionary Tale
See also: Sasha Grey, 2929 Productions; My Girlfriend Experience – A Set Diary, by Glenn Kenny; “The Girlfriend Experince” reaction on The Erotic Review