“Tatort” Cologne: TV review of the episode “Seventh Floor”

The film was shot in a real erotic center: On the set, the focus was on realism; the first few minutes lead into the dim, red, narrow corridor in which the women wait for customers. The fact that Hildegard Knef sings from the off: “At 16, I said silently, I want, want to be big… I want everything or nothing,” sets the accent of the new “Tatort” from Cologne on the broken dreams of the sex workers right from the start.

All or nothing? – For the three women that “Seventh Floor” is about, there was nothing. The script by Eva and Volker Zahn suggests that the term “sex workers” is a euphemism and ignores the fact that the “career” engine of these seemingly self-determined ladies consists of trauma, lies, abuse and inhumanity.

The three women are very different and sometimes enter the business voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, but they all find themselves on the seventh floor of a brothel and do their job for 50 or 60 euros per session.

The way the German-Kurdish director portrays this job probably needs a trigger warning on the one hand, but on the other hand, it wrests admiration from us. Nothing is blurred. The camera zooms in slow motion on jiggling buttocks, jiggling beer bellies, opened men’s mouths in ecstasy, and in between on hands reaching for euro bills, fingering around in wallets, tearing open condom packets.

For almost a minute there is literally pure business, then the light suddenly changes to a sterile blue, in which another naked body is immersed: the damaged corpse of the building technician. It fell out of a window on the titular seventh floor.

Nobody liked the macho man. Even his own sister comes under suspicion – like the prostitutes Jasmin (Antonia Bill), Cosima (Senita Huskic) and Tani (Maddy Forst) and the nail salon boss, played by rapper Sabrina Setlur. It’s a female crime thriller of a slightly different kind: the actresses are strong; but those feminists who believe in the great freedom of empowered sex workers will be disappointed.

A highly moral matter

The fact that such different characters are thrown together – one prostitute has a relationship with her father but no money worries, the other does, and the third puts up with her husband – is quite low on the credibility scale, just like the story of the film.

But credibility per se is not the aim of this social criticism, which is sometimes thrown directly at us. The fourth wall breaks, the women impressively – and somewhat pathetically – confront us with the reality of their lives: “It’s not my vagina that hurts, it’s the lie.”

The commissioners Ballauf (Klaus Behrendt), Schenk (Dietmar Bär) and assistant Jütte (Roland Riebeling) are consequently not in focus. What’s also successful is how Jütte turns out to be one of the 25 percent of German men who have already paid for sexual services and realizes that he was lying to his own pocket. “Seventh Floor” is a highly moral affair. But overall she has a lot of traction and pictures with oomph.

Dear Alexandra is an editor in the life department, with a focus on theater and socio-political issues. Studied German and English in Konstanz, Oxford and Freiburg i Br.More info

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