Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

I’m a bit late in getting to The Girlfriend Experience, which Steven Soderbergh premiered two nights ago at a secret Sundance Sneak Preview. (Full disclosure: I had to first write about it for my other outlet.) I was initially hesitating to review the film, simply because the director deemed it a “work in progress” and I have this weird feeling that he’s still trying to find his movie. But then everybody else went and reviewed it, so I guess that shouldn’t stop me. Yet it still sort of does: Maybe it’s because I had some more issues with it than most other writers seemed to.

True, the film seemed to play fine with the audience – it’s a return to the deliberately elliptical, improvised storytelling the director last explored in Bubble (which I loved). Porn star Sasha Grey seemed at ease acting out the role of a cold, high-priced call girl reassessing her long-term relationship while a series of increasingly futile transactions make her question the state of her life. “Transaction” seems to be the key word here – every exchange, every moment of intimacy is dulled down and treated as a bland procedural by Soderbergh’s cold, often static camera. I’d add “to a fault,” as the film often feels adrift amid all the dry negotiations and small talk. In his post-screening Q&A, Soderbergh said he was influenced by Antonioni’s Red Desert, and yet Desert is quiet, hypnotic, and tense – like a horror film in slow motion. The Girlfriend Experience, in its current state, is talky and immersive – it could use some of Desert’s tautness and dreamy melancholy.

That dry blandness is the point, of course: In 21st century America, everything has become a transaction. No wonder our heroine eventually confuses a particularly receptive trick for a potentially life-altering love affair. I wonder if there’s a double meaning to that title: A “girlfriend experience” is apparently the term for the full suite of services our heroine offers. In other words, you get more than a meaningless fuck when you’re with her; you get to go watch a film at the IFC Center, talk about it over an expensive meal, then go home, cuddle, and ease into your meaningless fuck. But is our heroine, who spends most of the film emotionally inert, finally duped by a desire to have her own “girlfriend experience”?

A mood of late-period capitalist doom hangs over the proceedings, as if we’re watching the whole system in all its intricate, soul-destroying glory right before it all comes collapsing. Appropriately enough, the story takes place in October of 2008 – the financial crisis is constantly referenced, as is the Presidential election. This was partly a result of circumstance – the film takes place in October because that’s when Soderbergh shot it – but it may also be a hedge: It makes a fitting bookend to Bush-era filmmaking, an epitaph for the Old New America.