SASHA GREY: She’s looking at a wad…of cash.

Amid the collateral wreckage on Wall Street last fall, New York magazine spotted a Craigslist post begging for schadenfreude. “Should I leave my fiancé?” the post asked. “My boyfriend…rather fiancé, is/was employed by Lehman Brothers. In less than a week we went from being millionaires to just having a couple of 100K…I suppose this means it’s over. I am who I am.”

I thought of this delightful story again watching Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, a movie that, despite featuring hardcore-porn starlet Sasha Grey as a $2,000-an-hour Manhattan call girl, isn’t about sex, power or love. It’s about money, and how it can buy imitations of sex, power and love. At age 21, Grey’s 160 credits include Asstravaganza 9, Grand Theft Anal 11 and Gang Bang My Face, so she has a fair idea of what men are willing to pay for. She projects an aura of worldly self-determination—she will do anything, except let you know when she’s faking—and The Girlfriend Experience is her attempt to diversify her portfolio. She plays an escort named Chelsea, who spends less time in bed than she does haggling over ways to expand her business. Chelsea spends each night with a different client, as if in simultaneous monogamy, and keeps records of every date, with special attention to the brands of lingerie worn. She takes lunches with a reporter (New York’s Mark Jacobson), who wants to know how much it would cost to meet the real her. “If they wanted you to be yourself,” she says, “they wouldn’t be paying you.”

Chelsea doesn’t mention two other facts: If they weren’t paying her, she wouldn’t have anything to do with them, and she wouldn’t take the money if she wanted to be herself. Whether Grey is aware of these realities is hard to determine: She keeps at an affectless remove, and could be calculating or shattered. Soderbergh does, though. His movie is a study of swank consumerism spiraling out of control. He often focuses his camera on the tony spaces—penthouses, hotel suites, restaurants—leaving the characters blurred. They’ve defined themselves by their surroundings anyway. The Girlfriend Experienceis a damning portrait of overindulgence (Soderbergh made the movie immediately after Che), but it also manages to inspire sympathy for Sasha Grey: not by punishing her, but by gently, persistently reminding her that she became a commodity to achieve a lifestyle. She is who she is. R.