Sasha Grey is not the sort of movie star you normally see discussed in these pages. With a resume that includes "Oral Supremacy" and "Sex Toy Teens," Grey has risen to become one of the top porn stars in the United States, appearing in more than 180 films in a three-year period starting when she was just 18. Yet she was always exceptional: content to rely on her own natural looks (without the implants considered de rigeur in the industry), adamant that her work was a form of performance art, and constantly undermining stereotypes. (How many porn stars can digress on the merits of Jean-Luc Godard vs. Agnes Varda?)

At the ripe old age of 21, Grey crossed over into mainstream movies with her starring role in director Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience," a sleek, cinema-verite look at one week in the life of a $2,000-per-hour call girl working in present-day Manhattan. It's a portrait of ridiculous wealth, sex reduced to a transaction, and a social scene traceable only to anonymous and tenuous connections formed via the Net.

Soderbergh cast Grey after being intrigued by an interview she did with Los Angeles magazine: It was a typically bold move by Soderbergh, whose 2006 handicam movie "Bubble" also opens in Japan on July 17, but it's also part and parcel of the "porn chic" that has infected art cinema for the past decade or so, from Catherine Breillat's "Romance" (which featured porn actor Rocco Siffredi, who also starred with Grey in her adult-movie debut) to "Baise-Moi" and "Shortbus."