Stunning performances in Campion series
Jane Campion gets away with things in “Top of the Lake: China Girl” that few other directors could, including taking extraordinary chances with plot and character that should not pay off but most decidedly do. You’ll see that when the six-episode, threenight second season of Campion’s drama returns to SundanceTV on Sunday, Sept. 10.
Detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) has returned to Australia and is attempting to re-establish her career and life, and compartmentalize her ever-present demons. During her time in New Zealand, she worked on a case that echoed a horrifying incident in her own life. She’s still haunted by it now that’s she’s back in Sydney. She finds herself fixated on the child she gave up only days after she gave birth 17 years earlier. The girl, Mary (Alice Englert), has written her but Robin hasn’t had the courage to write back. Instead, she pretty much stalks her, from a distance, observing Mary with
her adoptive parents, Pyke (Ewen Leslie ) and Julia (Nicole Kidman).
At the same time, we view a couple carrying a large, heavy suitcase to the edge of a cliff in the dark of night and throwing it into the sea. The suitcase reappears often in the early part of the miniseries, moving with disconcerting grace beneath the surface of the waters, something silken and dark streaming through an opening, like some kind of exotic undersea flora. As an aside, I know nothing about physics, but if you see bubbles rising from a submerged suitcase, I think that means it’s filling up with water. In turn, that would make it unlikely that the suitcase would rise to the surface and float toward the shore.
Bit by bit, Campion moves to various elements of the overall story. Julia and Pyke are separated, after Julia has fallen in love with a female French teacher at the school where she works. Mary has taken up with a 42-year-old, self-styled artist named Alexander, nicknamed “Puss” (David Dencik), who has some kind of association with a brothel specializing in young Asian women.
From here, the plot elements are built on a foundation of unlikely coincidence, the kind of thing you’d expect in a Victorian novel — the kind of thing that suggests the world is very small and everyone lives on an island. You spend a second or two thinking, well, that wouldn’t happen in real life, and then you move on, drawn to the characters and to the performances.
Campion is far more concerned with character than the niceties of plotting. In the first season, she was able to give deeper, shattering insight into Robin’s character through the experiences of the young girl named Tui who was found to be pregnant.
This time, Campion takes us deeper into Robin’s character by reflecting and refracting her experience through the characters of Mary, Julia, a missing girl from the brothel named Cinnamon, and Miranda (Gwendoline Christie), a young officer who is assigned to partner with Robin, much to Robin’s initial displeasure.
These women, together and individually, create a kind of cinematic discussion on what it means to be a mother and in a larger sense, what it means to be female.
How do men fit into that “conversation”? How do the males impose their definitions on the nature of women? There are the men who raped Robin years earlier, there is the odious Puss, whose hold on Mary is hard to fathom, there is Pyke, of course — fussy, ineffectual, resentful — and there is Brett (Lincoln Vickery) who has been patronizing the brothel looking for GFE — a girlfriend experience. He is also part of a group of guys who regularly get together and rate prostitutes. Each of these men, in ways both subtle and glaring, think they can impose their own concepts of what a woman is on the female characters. And, in ways only glaring, they haven’t got a clue.
This is what we take away from “China Girl.” The unlikely plot conveniences are irrelevant, and there’s a moment in the finale that can only be described as a complete howler. It’s a moment of excess and perhaps hubris, but as overblown as it is, it doesn’t sink the film because of how the characters are written and performed.
It would be difficult if not impossible to find so many top-notch performances in one series as you will find in “China Girl.” Moss delivers a performance of symphonic complexity. Inevitably, and without giving anything away, there’s a moment when Robin realizes the links between her life, the case she’s working on and her biological daughter’s life. She has to be gobsmacked at the realization, but she barely reacts — at least not in a demonstrable way. It’s not necessary: We see it in her face, in her eyes.
Kidman is brilliantly icy and unforgiving. Her face seemingly free of any makeup, a serpentine tangle of gray hair on her head, she is credibly monstrous. And yet, she is a woman whose anger has to be directed at the rest of the world because she doesn’t have the emotional tools to be a mother to her daughter, a wife to her husband, a partner to her lover. She has been victimized by the imposition of other people’s concepts of what she should be as a woman and is rebelling against them, however clumsily.
Casting Christie as Robin’s partner Miranda was genius. She is imposing, of course, towering over Robin and many of the men in the Sydney police department. Because of her physical presence, others have certain expectations of Miranda. In her way, she’s struggling to be who she is and belie those expectations. She is improbably girlish, a goo-goo-eyed romantic, but she also stands up for herself.
Englert, Campion’s daughter, makes Mary more than just a headstrong, rebellious teenager. Like many of the other women in the film, she is tough and determined, but at her age, she is just learning to sort out and separate who she really is from the expectations imposed by others around her, especially Julia, who she thinks has betrayed her.
Vickery makes Brett more than just damaged goods. He is a victim of societal expectations almost as much as the female characters are. Vickery delivers a nuanced and disturbing performance, one that regularly manipulates our feelings about Brett’s character. For a while, we feel sorry for him as he clings to fantasy. Later, our feelings change radically.
The coincidence-laden plot, the floating suitcase, a few moments of character inconsistency and a really bad, mad decision on how the series ends, cannot be overlooked, of course, but these are far outweighed by the overall power of the series, the strength of the performance and most of all what Campion wants us to understand about identity and expectations of others.