The Girlfriend Experience

Chelsea is a high-end call girl in Manhattan who charges two thousand dollars an hour and offers clients more than sex: she gives them conversation and companionship, an arrangement she calls the girlfriend experience. Her business is successful and she lives in comfort, and her live-in boyfriend Chris, a personal trainer, accepts her way of life. The balance she believes she controls is unsettled by a new client, and the story unfolds over a handful of days set against the 2008 United States presidential election, as Chelsea deals with pressures from her clients, her work and her relationship.

Steven Soderbergh directed the film, working from a screenplay by Brian Koppelman and David Levien and producing with Gregory Jacobs. It is the eighteenth of the thirty-five features he has directed in chronological order, coming between The Informant! and Contagion. Sasha Grey, known before this for adult films, plays Chelsea, also called Christine, with Chris Santos as Chris, and Philip Eytan, Peter Zizzo, Ron Stein and Marshall Gilman among the twenty-four credited cast members. The drama runs seventy-seven minutes.

Made for about two million dollars, the film took roughly one million at the worldwide box office, so it did not recoup its budget in cinemas. A critics' rating of 6.4/10 from 138 reviews sits above the audience scores of 5.5/10 on IMDb from around eighteen thousand votes and 5.1/10 on TMDB from roughly three hundred and fifty.