The Girlfriend Experience

The Girlfriend Experience (2009) is a watch-online drama on iFILM directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring adult film actress Sasha Grey in a quasi-documentary feature shot on digital video with minimal scripting. At two thousand dollars an hour, Chelsea's clients aren't buying time — they're buying the feeling of being known.

Her regulars are wealthy New York financiers who want dinner conversation, someone to hold their hand, a woman who listens. She has a live-in boyfriend who trains bodies for a living and knows exactly what she does. The arrangement works until the 2008 financial collapse starts emptying her clients' accounts and one new connection threatens to crack the careful distance she keeps between business and feeling.

Soderbergh assembles the film from non-chronological fragments — part mood piece, part cold transaction audit — clocking in at 77 minutes. It is less interested in titillation than in what loneliness looks like when it's priced per hour. Stream The Girlfriend Experience (2009) online on iFILM.