Helena, 30, a single mother with an 11-year-old daughter, is a moderately successful actress who earns a living as an escort in the sex industry. Her relationship with her own mother, a singing teacher, is tense, and she’s also increasingly annoyed with her job. Meeting David offers her an opportunity.
Snapshots from the brittle contemporary biography of a working woman, part 2: Helena at work, decked out in latex, leather and fishnet stockings, batting her eyelashes and brandishing sex toys. Male clients with various sexual predilections. A casting call where she’s supposed to play an ‘uncontrollably horny’ woman. A post-feminist lecture on the body, getting old and cosmetic surgery. And again and again, sex as a performance, relationships of a purely economic status. Body discourses. The mother stands for a time in which ‘female self-actualisation’ meant something very different. The little daughter recites a poem by Heinrich Heine. Helena finally comes up with a new sexual service; when the hunt is over, the women have been brought down and the men crow in triumph, there she stands, beautiful, severe and implacable. Like an absolute ruler. (Birgit Kohler)
Production: Turanskyj & Ahlrichs, Berlin
Screenplay: Tatjana Turanskyj
Camera: Lotta Kilian
Cast: Julia Hummer, Susanne Bredehöft, Jojo Pohl, RP Kahl
Format: QuickTime ProRes 1:1.85, Colour
Running time: 94 min
Languages: German, English
Top Girl oder la déformation professionnelle
Top Girl or la déformation professionnelle
Tatjana Turanskyj
Germany 2014
