Television
Murder, trafficking and porn are spotlighted in the second season of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake.
This time, there’s no lake with a stunning mountain backdrop, although
Top of the Lake: China Girl (UKTV, Sky 007, Tuesday, 9.30pm) does have a watery beginning involving – like countless cop shows before it – the body of a young woman.
Except this is New Zealand director Jane Campion, who has spent a life in films exploring the female experience of a male world; outsiders, raucous rebels, “crazy” women. The second season of Top of the Lake may start with a typical crime story, but like the first, it’s not going to be similar to any other television crime show.
The first season “was about the matriarchy versus the patriarchy”, Campion told Variety. “This one’s more internal and maternal.” There is a lot to be said about motherdaughter relationships: the amazing Elisabeth Moss once again plays Detective Robin Griffin, who returns to Sydney to make contact with Mary (Alice Englert), the daughter she gave up for adoption.
Then there’s Mary’s infuriating adoptive mother, Julia (Nicole Kidman), who has become estranged from Mary and her husband (Ewen Leslie). Mary, searching for control of her life, has taken up with a dangerous older man named Puss (David Dencik), who lives above a brothel and is heard to say, “The destiny of man is to enslave women.”
Robin is thrown into the investigation of the death of the young Asian woman whose body is found crammed into a suitcase on Bondi Beach. She teams up with uniformed cop Miranda ( Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie), a comedy height pairing, although to be fair, nearly everyone looks small against the 1.9m Christie.
It’s dark and difficult but not without sly humour. Campion “shines a light on issues and sort of explodes them”, Christie told the Hollywood Reporter, “and it causes you to
question all your preconceptions and what stereotypes are and encourages you to see beyond that”.
For Campion, it’s the characters and their stories. “I’m not interested at all in procedural police work,” she says. “I’m interested in how the themes of the story weave together.”
As well as trafficking and the exploitation of women, there’s a group of porn-addicted guys, one of whom is connected with the dead woman. Most of the men in the drama do not come off well.
“We’re a long way from really understanding the female experience of being in the world,” says Campion. “We’ve been brainwashed a bit by the patriarchal experience.”