From www.esquire.com- Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, The Girlfriend Experience, is about being pretty. The pretty one, an expensive escort, wants to leverage her beauty, her career, her relationships (with her clients, her boyfriend, the journalist doing a story on her, the guy running her Web site) in order to become powerful… in some way. Maybe she could write a book. Maybe she could expand her Web site. Maybe she could fly to Dubai with a contingent of other escorts and make some easy cash. That kind of power.

Which is interesting because the film is set against a backdrop of powerlessness: America right before the last presidential election. People are making bets on Obama or McCain. They’re talking about the bailout. They’re talking about the price of gold. People are freaked.

We follow the woman over the course of a few weeks — she becomes enamored with a client, agrees to go away with him for a weekend, delivers that news to her live-in boyfriend — but none of the action matters much; in almost every scene she remains stoic and removed. But in a hot way.

The woman, played by Sasha Grey (whose only previous film experience was as a porn star), is guarded, mellow, and skeptical. You can’t tell if she’s smart. She seems smart in the way all quiet people seem smart: Maybe she just allows other people to sound stupid. Mostly, she (the character and the actress) plays a girl who is pretty. This film and Grey’s performance, which is unrefined but totally captivating, make almost every other easy label for a woman seem boring and inadequate. Through Grey, Soderbergh makes prettiness devastating. But also therapeutic. For everybody.

This film is about what prettiness can do for women and to men and the other way around. How it can destroy or uplift. And what it means when things are going to shit. Pretty is sex. Pretty is money. Pretty holds the promise of redemption. Pretty is life.