TOP OF THE LAKE: CHINA GIRL
Jane Campion on Top of The Lake’s reLoCaTed reTurn…
Why they were right not to call it Top Of The Lake: Let’s Dance.
It was meant to be a one-off. But after the sensational response to Jane Campion’s sublime 2013 procedural Top Of The Lake, the show is back. Four years on from our last encounter, time has not been kind to Detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss). “She’s in a super-dark place,” says Moss. Single, drinking heavily, living in a shared apartment in Sydney: only Robin’s work is keeping her from a full-on breakdown.
“I don’t think that’s an unfamiliar place for any woman or any person to have, at a time like that in their life, where they don’t know how to get out of a trough,” says Campion, who reunited with her writing partner Gerard Lee to craft six new episodes. “To start with her there, and try to see her claw back a life, for me was an interesting beginning. A dark beginning. Perhaps a difficult beginning.”
Noting how unusual it is to begin a second series with a character at their lowest ebb, Moss didn’t take much convincing to return to the character, after Campion asked if she was interested. “I said, ‘Yeah. Let’s just make sure it’s darker and more fuckedup and challenging than the first one!’
What’s the point of doing another one if you can’t go somewhere else and you can’t be more challenged by it?”
CITY OF LOST CHILDREN
Top Of The Lake: China Girl measures up to Moss’ criteria, beginning when the rotting corpse of an unidentified Asian call girl, squeezed inside a suitcase, washes up on Bondi Beach. Griffin is assigned, alongside her eager new partner Miranda (Gwendoline Christie, Game Of Thrones and The Force Awakens). But there’s more, with Robin seeking out the daughter she gave up for adoption – the result of being sexually assaulted as a teenager.
That girl has now grown into the spiky 17-year-old Mary (played by Campion’s own daughter, Alice Englert), who was raised by her adopted mother Julia (Nicole Kidman) and father Pyke (Ewen Leslie), an estranged married couple who still live together despite Julia declaring herself a lesbian and hooking up with a new partner.
Compared to the remote New Zealand settings of the original series, it’s all very sophisticated and metropolitan. “I wanted to stay in New Zealand and Jane went ‘no’,” laughs Lee, who was argued down by Campion.
“I felt like we’d done what we could do with that landscape – the metaphors of fallen paradise,” shrugs his co-writer. “I was really interested in bringing the story to Sydney, because I live there and it’s convenient. I love it, I love Sydney – it’s a very beautiful city. And we needed a bigger lake!”
The theme of the abuse of women – also explored in the first series, with the female refuge led by Holly Hunter’s guru – permeates the fabric of the show, right down to sexism in the workplace.