Something sinister lurks beneath the Aussie sun - and it’s addictive
A CTReSS elisabeth moss made the naive mistake, before the launch of her fantasy drama The handmaid’s Tale earlier this year, of describing herself as a human being first, and a woman second.
‘It’s not a feminist story,’ she said. ‘ It’s a human story, because women’s rights are human rights.’
uproar ensued. moss was pilloried and vilified by angry feminists, which was ironic: in The handmaid’s Tale, she plays a slavewoman who risks public execution if she speaks out of turn.
No such danger with her latest work, Top Of The Lake: China Girl (BBC2). No one has any rights in the bleakly surreal detective drama, and most characters have forgotten what it is to be human.
even moss, as Detective Robin Griffin, is a mess. Plagued by nightmares after a case which ended with her shooting her police boss, she goes home to Sydney and starts stalking the family that adopted her daughter 17 years ago — a child born after she was raped.
She hasn’t been back a week before she discovers a body washed up in a suitcase, a victim of people traffickers who run a sex ring.
If this is what modern Australia is really like, the sterile, fascist world of the handmaids is a holiday camp. Nicole Kidman plays a feminist
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academic whose obnoxious teenage daughter despises her.
Nicole is magnificently shallow and conceited, but wins our sympathy as she flinches under verbal lashes from her selfish child.
Top Of The Lake’s writer and director Jane Campion is never scared of colossal coincidences, so here’s where your head might start to spin.
Nicole’s teenage brat mary (Alice englert) is actually adopted — and her birth mother, of course, is Detective Robin. Kidman and moss haven’t met yet, but when they do it’s bound to be explosive.
An east european druggie and failed academic called Alexander is the nastiest villain, so skin- crawlingly unpleasant you’ll want to take a shower every time he appears. Gwendoline Christie, the warrior giantess from Game Of Thrones, is Robin’s protegee.
It’s unlikely, depressing, bitter and instantly addictive. The Beeb has uploaded all six episodes to iPlayer, and the temptation to spend the weekend binge-watching will overwhelm many viewers.
The cast is excellent, but the outstanding attraction is moss, who has the ability to project her thoughts and emotions as if they were running across the screen in luminous captions. In the States, she’s known as the Queen of Peak TV: this is why.
Raw emotion was on display, too, from men not accustomed to shows of sentiment, on Inside The London Fire Brigade (ITV). Officers who fought to rescue people trapped in the Grenfell Tower blaze last month choked up with tears, describing their haunting memories.
‘ I could see faces at the window,’ said one. ‘ There were firefighters who were exhausted but wanted to get back inside there and rescue more.’ This documentary, the first of three, conveyed the heroism of the fire crews without exploiting their trauma or encroaching on the grief of the bereaved families.
It trod a careful balance — on the one side it risked being mawkish, on the other ghoulish, but it avoided both.
There was a reminder, too, that danger and tragedy are everpresent in a fireman’s life, as the brigade responded to the Croydon tram crash last year in which seven people died.
however highly we respected our firefighters already, this programme can only have increased our national sense of gratitude for their bravery.