The path from porn to mainstream cinema bears the footprints of few brave individuals. Among the select band to attempt this most precarious career crossover is Sasha Grey, a celebrated adult performer who cites Jean-Luc Godard and David Bowie as influences. She stars as the call girl Chelsea in Steven Soderbergh’s latest foray into low-budget experimental digital cinema, The Girlfriend Experience. Grey is certainly a photogenic creature — self-possessed, icy and meticulously groomed. But for all her intriguing cultural references, the chances are slim that her aloof presence will translate to a mainstream acting career.

The film’s off-the-cuff production technique has facilitated an immediacy that cinema can rarely achieve. This is a snapshot of a very particular moment: it takes place over a few days during the American presidential campaign and financial crisis last year.

“The girlfriend experience” that Chelsea provides, for an undisclosed fee, includes dinner in a designer eatery, maybe a movie and usually sex. But the focus of this consciously unerotic film is the conversation. The sphinx-like Grey listens inscrutably to a series of frazzled Wall Street traders venting their mounting monetary panic. The tacit truth is that as the markets topple, so does the client base for the transient luxury service that Chelsea provides. Like a Maserati or a Louis Vuitton luggage set, she’s an expensive status symbol. If she’s aware of an approaching crisis in the world’s oldest profession, she doesn’t show it. Instead, we focus on a rocky patch with her equally pretty, equally vapid boyfriend.

With its deliberate avoidance of titillation, the long, whingeing rants about the state of the financial market and the alienating remoteness of Grey’s performance, The Girlfriend Experience is mesmerising in its dullness. But there is something so beautiful in the way Soderbergh films it that transcends boredom. There’s little hint in Grey’s screen presence of hidden depths under her glossy surface — but as such, she’s perfectly cast in this curiously cold and undeniably handsome film.

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