There are currently three films out in the cinemas that deal with private and commercial sexual fantasies in very different ways: Ulrich Seidl’s “IN THE BASEMENT,” Cheyenne Picardo’s “REMEDY” and Tatjana Turanskyj’s “TOP GIRL OR LA DÉFORMATION PROFESSIONELLE.” In Seidl’s film people into BDSM are like exhibited objects in fairground booths, only to be seen by people with high school graduation – a kind of visual slumification in cinematic Louboutins. But at least Seidl lets his protagonists talk. And especially the voice of a masochistic woman, naked and bound, about her precise differentiation between erotic submission and consensual pain opposed to violence and abuse, shows the high amount of self-reflection that her sexual preference requires.
REMEDY and TOP GIRL on the other hand are about the commercial side of BDSM, but approach this subject with totally different perspectives. Cheyenne Picardo, director of REMEDY, worked in New York as a switch in a BDSM club, so she knows both the dominant and the submissive side. REMEDY is an autobiographical film about her experiences. Tatjana Turanskyj’s TOP GIRL, however, is more reminiscent of René Pollesch’s theater of discourse that was popular in the 1990s. It is the second part of a planned trilogy about women and work. Even though it ostensibly about Helena, an unemployed actress (Julia Hummer) who works as an escort and fulfills the sexual desires of her clients, the film is mostly about materials, phrases and theses in an accented artificiality, often in parodic inversion. A lecture on cosmetic surgery is flavored so much with post-feminist rhetoric that only a feminist critique on self-optimisation is left. Relationships between people arise only on a material basis, it is all about money and work, with the money only being passed on in concealed envelopes. The men’s sexual fantasies are almost always about gender switching, much as Judith Butler proposed it as a feminist strategy some years ago. In Turanskyj’s film, male submission fantasies are becoming fantasies again, in which men occupy a female position and move to a place from which they can fantasize about the subjugation of femininity, even if the formally assume the submissive position.
The woman is always below, whether symbolically or in reality. Whether TOP GIRL actually knows the world the film is about is ultimately irrelevant for the artistic concept. Economics is the cause for the disappearance of the female identity, and sex work is an intensified form of that, as it kills the body more quickly. The roles in this film describe positions, not characters. Helena and her mother represent two generations of false consciousness. The older woman because she follows an ideal of self-realization that turns out to be a market-compliant self-confinement, the younger one because she fails to recognize the relentless commodification and objectification of her body. She thinks of herself as a player in this game, but is only a screen for projection and agent of self-extinction. There are no personal, only business relationships between these two figures. It is a thesis film about which one can and should talk, but which does not have any aesthetically representative function and whose relationship to a pre-cinematic, pre-conceptual reality exists only theoretically and metaphorically.

Tom Dorow