If you look at Steven Soderbergh’s body of work from the last dozen years or so, it seems with every film the director becomes more obsessed the way careerists lose themselves in their work. Out of Sight and Che join up thematically with the Ocean’s films, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, even the The Limey, as movies about work, in which the people who do the work are so single-mindedly focused on the tasks ahead of them that work and life become a continuum, and the identities they create to get through the former can’t get put away at the end of the day when it’s ostensibly time to attend to the latter. They’re films in which life ends up happening in sudden moments, organically, as an unexpected side effect of the job.

The Girlfriend Experience is no exception, though this is not exactly the meticulous document of process that Che was. Starring porn star Sasha Grey as a high-end escort who alternately goes by the names Chelsea and Christine, Soderbergh’s quick and cheap digital feature is not the graphically sexual verite that fans of Grey’s previous filmography might have expected/hoped for. Instead, it’s a cold (although understandably, necessarily so), hands-off portrait of a certain New York City life about a month before the 2008 presidential election. Though improvised based on a linear outline and shot in sequence, as edited Experience jumps back and forth in time somewhat frantically. At Sundance, Soderbergh cited his own The Limey as an inspiration for the new film’s construction, and though there are similarities, this seems slightly more methodical. Here Soderbergh often jumps ahead to sketch out an events or conversation, then moves on to something else, then goes back to color in the details of the sketch.  (The version available now on VOD and premiering in theaters next week felt slightly tighter to me than the rough cut shown in January, but that might have been an illusion; I might have just been more ready for its non-linearality the second time around.)

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