I was one of the lucky few who managed to finagle a ticket to the Tribeca screening of Steven Soderbergh's latest "indie" (read: Not Ocean's 14th) film last Tuesday night. I was interested in his feature, The Girlfriend Experience, for two reasons:

1) It had been getting major hype for including a cast of non-actors save the lead, Sasha Grey, who is infamous for being perhaps the first hyper-literate porn star (she once wanted to use Anna Karina as her stage name), and

2) Because I hold a deep, somewhat dubious belief that one day Soderbergh will work through whatever gender-related issues he started with Sex, Lies and Videotape and manage to avoid becoming another Neil Labute (In the Company of Men to The Wicker Man in the span of a decade!) lazy misogynist. Boy, was I wrong.

 The movie itself was quite good: A young, chic call-girl and her experiences with different Johns around the city, dutifully chronicled on a blog she keeps in her giant apartment (shared by her live-in boyfriend, a personal trainer who looks exactly like a lost Dillon brother). My problem with the film isn't the stunt-casting, or the fact that Soderbergh chose Grey for this film because her character is a thinly-veiled allegory for Grey's public life as a young, chic porn actress. No, the problem with this film is that *spoiler alert* of course the whore has to fall: There is no way two male writers and a male director could write a script where the call-girl ends up happy with the choices she's made in life. Even though Grey's character Chelsea is all business - managing her online image so meticulously that she could be her own hired PR agent - the non-linear narrative sets her up to fail by having her fall in love with one of her hapless clients (a charming screenwriter played by - d'oi - the film's writer David Levien). Levien's attraction to Grey in the film is based not on her poise, her beauty, or hell, even any of those thoughts that may or may not make up this character's personality. Instead he becomes interested in her the moment she makes the fatal mistake is letting her guard down and becoming vulnerable enough to open up to a client. This allows Levien to become Chelsea's knight in shining armor, before (inevitably?) revealing himself to be just as weak and guilty as anyone else who goes looking for sex with a stranger. In total: He is merely human for his error, while she is to be condemned for letting allowing chink in her armor.

So whatever sex worker's rights or girl-power image this film may have banked on is completely destroyed by the end of the movie: The lady is the tramp, and she must be punished for her indiscretions. If Soderbergh meant for this film to be, as Village Voice critic J. Hoberman calls "the first to allegorize (a porn star's) own situation" then what does that say for Soderbergh's respect for his leading lady, or in a broader sense, all female sex workers? Not much, as it turns out.