Top Girl ( Top Girl oder La déformation professionnelle )

Top Girl (DVD) (*)

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Original Title: Top Girl oder La déformation professionnelle
Language Selections:
English ( Subtitles )
German ( Dolby Digital 5.1 )

Product Origin/Format:
Germany ( PAL/Region 0 )

Running Time:
95 min

Aspect Ratio:
Widescreen (1.85:1)

Special Features:
Interactive Menu
Scene Access

Movie filmed in 2014 and produced in:
Germany ( Germany, Central Europe )

Directed By:
Tatjana Turanskyj

Written By:
Tatjana Turanskyj
Sylke Rene Meyer

Actors:
Julia Hummer ..... Helena
Rolf Peter Kahl ..... David
Susanne Bredehöft ..... Lotte
Katharina Bellena ..... Mutter 1
Karim Cherif ..... Bulli
Samia Dauenhauer ..... Love
Stefan Mehren ..... Boss der Jagdgesellschaft
Mario Pokatzky ..... Hansi
Anna Schmidt ..... Bernadette
Susanne Strach ..... Loreley
Sabine Weithöner

Synopsis:

TOP GIRL is the second part of the women and work trilogy by the writer-director Tatjana Turanskyj. Helena, 29, 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 is also increasingly annoyed with her job. Snapshots from the brittle contemporary biography of a working woman, part 2: Helena at work, decked out in latex, batting her eyelashes and brandishing sex toys. 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.

The actress and singer Julia Hummer, best known to non-German audiences for her role in Oliver Assayas' terrorism epic Carlos, stars as Helena, a 30-year-old single mother who supplements her patchy career as an actress with a far more lucrative sideline as an escort. Top Girl features several of her encounters with clients, which run the gamut from creepy to comical to humiliating. For one, she dresses up as a Catwoman dominatrix. Another favors dressing in women's clothes and penetration with sex toys. But playful performance masks harsh economic necessity. Between clients and auditions, Helena has fractious discussions with her mother Lotte (Susanne Bredehoft), a singer and music teacher from an earlier feminist tradition. She also attends promotional lectures in which genital cosmetic surgery is sold as female liberation. Eventually, under threat of losing losing the apartment bankrolled by one of her wealthy regulars, Helena bows to pressure to recruit female colleagues for a corporate event at which their lowly social status is exploited in sinister patriarchal power games. Shifting in tone between domestic naturalism, stylized agitprop and darkly funny commentary on gender politics, Top Girl is a frustratingly half-baked mix. The grim financial options faced by cash-strapped sex workers have been anatomized countless times on screen, and Turanskyj has little fresh to add to the subject. Likewise her use of sloganeering political rhetoric, which feels like a clumsy throwback to 1970s student theater. Her no-frills shooting style is adequate, but pedestrian. In her favor, the film's most powerful sequence is a queasy satirical depiction of a male-bonding session in the woods outside Berlin, in which naked women are reduced to hunted animals.

Drama about a Berlin escort girl combines clunky polemic with spiky satire.

This product was added to our catalog on Tuesday 30 August, 2016.

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