"You ever try masturbating? It’s very relaxing and not fattening..."
The disappearance of a pregnant preteen exposes the raw wounds at the heart of an isolated southern New Zealand community in this absorbing and richly atmospheric thriller. Centered around Elisabeth Moss' excellent performance as a detective for whom the case uncovers disturbing echoes of her own troubled history, this multistranded crime saga from writer-director Jane Campion and co-creator Gerard Lee is satisfyingly novelistic in scope and dense in detail. Yet it also boasts something more, a singular and provocative strangeness that lingers like a chill after the questions of who-dun-what have been laid to rest.
The opening shot zooms through a devastatingly gorgeous landscape on New Zealand’s South Island to a lake, clearly freezing cold. A beautiful twelve-year-old girl walks into the titular water up to her neck and just stands there until a local woman passing by breaks her trance and pulls her out. The girl is five months pregnant, and refuses to tell anyone who the father is. Enter detective Robin Griffin (Mad Men’s Moss, with an impeccable Kiwi accent), who’s come back to her small hometown of Laketop to visit her dying mother. She’s tasked with questioning the pregnant pre-teen Tui (Jacqueline Joe) who, after again refusing to divulge the name of her child’s father, is sent back to her own dad — local drug lord Matt Micham (Peter Mullan), a prime suspect. Mitcham, it transpires, seems to have fathered half the local population; Tui is the just the youngest of his numerous offspring, his daughter by his third (ex-)wife, a Thai immigrant.
The next day, Tui steals a horse and rides it to an area on her father’s land where a group of damaged, middle-aged women have set up a camp called Paradise. They live in shipping crates and follow the lead of an androgynous oracle figure/truth-teller played by Holly Hunter, who’s reuniting with Campion for the first time since winning an Oscar for The Piano in 1994. The silver-haired guru has come to Laketop to open a camp for abused and/or abandoned women. Unfortunately, the camp has been built on a piece of land that has long been eyed by Micham, who seems to own everyone and everything in town. The Paradise Ladies give the girl refuge for the night. In the morning, she’s gone, and the mystery truly begins after the first hour of screentime.
The mood of the series is so taut and eerie, you can't initially tell if the story will stay grounded in reality or shift into bizarre Twin Peaks territory. (At one point, Yuan was convinced she’d find out that the lake itself had impregnated Tui.) But it also has a uniquely Down Under humor throughout (Campion is herself from New Zealand) that keeps it from easy comparisons to Lost or other great TV mysteries. (Favorite line, from one Paradise woman to another: "You ever try masturbating? It’s very relaxing and not fattening.") Over the course of the remaining running time, the story abounds in the requisite twists and complications: The lake coughs up the body of a local businessman, while suspicion falls on a hermit who turns out to be a convicted sex offender. But these developments are doled out at a measured clip, and the filmmakers seem less interested in sustaining forward momentum than in painting a vivid panorama of this broken community, a town cloaked in a dark and vaguely incestuous malaise.
From the hooligans (Jay Ryan, Kip Chapman) who carry out Mitcham's bidding to the sad-sack women who gather at GJ's camp, there's a pervasive sense of human lives either wasted or forced into familiar and depressing patterns. The wildness of the surroundings informs the wildness of the characters: Parents and children are forever at odds, and acts of violence and violation are distressingly commonplace, to the point where even Mitcham reacts to the news of Tui's ordeal not with outrage, but with a cynical roll of the eye ("She's a slut, like her dad was a slut!"). Amid this, Hunter is often the hilariously frank comic relief, as well as the story’s moral centre; one can only hope she’ll take on more juicy character parts like this (and generally appear onscreen more) going forward.
As for Moss, this is the performance that could set a very promising tone for her post-Mad Men career. Despite its narrative breadth, Top of the Lake is first and foremost Robin's story. As the detective rekindles a romance with another Mitcham son (Thomas M. Wright) while flirting erratically with her superior officer (David Wenham), she finds her personal life bumping up against her investigation to a near-ludicrous degree. Much of the third hour is devoted to exploring Robin's past traumas as a teenager, and while the idea that she sees a younger version of herself in Tui represents perhaps the tale's most conventional conceit, it supplies a potent emotional fulcrum that pushes the drama into its moving, startling if not always plausible final hours.
Moss, a long way from Mad Men, brings a gripping combination of pluck, vulnerability and intense anger to the complicated role of a woman who fights for every inch of ground and at one point drives a broken bottle into a man's chest. "It was very hard technically," Moss recalls. "I was bleeding, bruises the next day, my voice was gone." Campion's films have long gone against the grain with their strong, embattled distaff protagonists and daring portrayals of female sexuality, and if Top of the Lake isn't in quite the same neighborhood as 'In the Cut', it nonetheless calls on Moss and others to bare themselves physically and emotionally in a story located at the juncture of sex and violence. Stripped bare, both emotionally raw and literally, Moss says she initially balked at being naked; revealing after the screening, "You don’t want to be put in any position — pun intended — that’s not good." But then she figured that "Jane Campion is the most feminist woman on earth; she’s going to be the last person to take advantage of you. She just made me feel safe. Most importantly, too, she was like, 'You’re gonna look great!'"
The other commanding turn here comes from Mullan, playing the unkempt Mitcham as a rough-mannered scoundrel who is not without a certain gruff, randy charm. Other bright spots in the excellent ensemble include Robyn Nevin, tough and sensible as Robin's cancer-stricken mother; Joe, who invests Tui with a fiery refusal to be victimized; and Hunter, making the most of dialogue that basically consists of a string of gnomic pronouncements.
Campion filmed her story in New Zealand, with the drama revolving around a stunning location near Queenstown. But by far the material's most distinctive element is its setting, a wooded region of stunning natural beauty and surpassing human ugliness that lends a uniquely bleak and bitter tang to an otherwise well-worn genre format. Adam Arkapaw's lensing of this unspoiled and unruly landscape is one of the production's chief pleasures, and composer Mark Bradshaw supports the action with a melancholy score that sounds entirely endemic to the setting. New Zealand, of course, is primarily known for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films so it was important for the people behind Top of the Lake to show a different side to the region. "It's the most comprehensive documentation of modern New Zealand that's ever been done at such a large scale," Moss said. "We show a very different, much more modern, much grittier, much more raw side of it. By the end of production, we couldn't pass a place we didn't shoot in."
Filming took roughly five to six months, primarily in Queenstown and a town about 40 minutes outside of it. Moss, who left for New Zealand days after finishing season five of Mad Men, reminisced about the off-the-cuff rehearsals in a shed with no heating ("it was cold") and production having one satellite phone so they call into town. For Hunter, who - at first - was hesitant to take the job after reading the script, praised Campion's take on the haunting story, saying it had an "incredible maturity" to it. The series, directed by Campion and Garth Davis, was co-written by Campion and Gerard Lee, with producers including Philippa Campbell, Emile Sherman and Iain Canning. Campion annouced ahead of the screening: "I was doing something I'd never tried to do before. It felt crazily ambitious at the beginning to control a six-hour story but sharing it with Gerard was probably the easy part."
Much of the cast and crew had flown in from all around the world, not just New Zealand, but also the U.K. In the Q&A, we learned that newcomer Jacqueline Joe, who plays Tui, had been discovered at an Auckland swimming pool; that Moss had to fight for the part because it was hard for anyone to see her as a strong, tough detective after playing Peggy for so long; and that Hunter’s first reaction to being offered the part of GJ was, "Jane, why don’t you get Ben Kingsley to play this?" Pretty much every person who stood up to ask a question spent at least a minute congratulating himself and the rest of the audience for having made it to the end. 'I felt a lot of love for all the audience because we’d been through the winter together," Campion said. We’re all still waiting for our badges of honour, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment