Jane Campion’s ‘Top of the Lake: China Girl’ Can’t Match The First Season [Review]

Watching Jane Campion stumble through the second season of her SundanceTV series, “Top of the Lake: China Girl,” means watching an imminently talented and self-assured storyteller misplace her self-assurance. In keeping with its first season, “Top of the Lake’s” craftsmanship remains stellar in its second; Campion’s eye for impeccable visuals hasn’t faded. Also in keeping with the first season is her high standard for performance. No single actor in her ensemble cast slacks, or slouches, or otherwise impedes the production.

But Campion’s writing, once again buttressed by the contributions of collaborator Gerard Lee, is propped up by naught but coincidence and contrivance, a wobbling house of cards ever on the verge of collapsing under its shameless artifice. Her continuance of the narrative she architected in 2013 lacks poise; it’s so coltish that if Campion’s name didn’t make repeat appearances during the credits, you’d likely peg it as the first work of a much less experienced author, a debut with frayed edges but the promise of potential yet to be realized. You might be inclined to forgive its of its obnoxious clichés and frustrating insistence on taking shortcuts for fabricating drama. You might, then, declare it good enough, an ambitious and restrained thriller that indulges just a tad too much in easy, interwoven conflict.

That makes “Top of the Lake’s” second season a unique disappointment. Campion is better than this. She’s spent a career spanning nearly four decades proving that she’s better than this, and if the show still feels very much like a product of her creative spirit, it’s an inadequate presentation of what she’s capable of nonetheless. The mistakes she makes here are the sort one excuses in an amateur work. Campion isn’t an amateur. She’s a master. So how did she lose her way this badly, and in a series that made such an impressive artistic statement four years ago when it went to air and snatched everyone’s breath away? In the time between then and now, what happened to her gift for economical storytelling and her supreme confidence as a creator?

Maybe I’m overreacting, you say. Maybe you haven’t seen this season of “Top of the Lake.” I’m not fool enough to claim that this is a worse show than the worst shows I’ve encountered thus far in 2017, but it should have been a slam dunk: She still has Elisabeth Moss as her leading lady, she still has full control over the camera and her mise en scène, and this time around, she has an outstanding batch of newcomers to her set to match the terrific, no-longer-with-us players from season one: Trading out Peter Mullan and Holly Hunter for Gwendoline Christie, David  Dencik, Ewen Leslie, Nicole Kidman, and Campion’s own incredibly gifted daughter, Alice Englert, feels like a fair enough swap. (Admittedly, the series loses out on Robyn Nevin, too, among many others, but let’s keep the list short for brevity’s sake.)

But the quality of Campion’s plotting is too thin, too lax, and on occasion even too absurd for the sake of all that’s good here. We rejoin detective Robin Griff (Moss), returned to Sydney following the events of last season; with New Zealand in her rearview, she dives back into police work, first instructing new recruits on the proper protocol for handcuffing a suspect (which, unsurprisingly, goes astoundingly poorly), then following the threads on a case involving the discovery of a dead Asian girl (hence the season’s subtitle), found jammed inside of a suitcase on the shores of Bondi Beach. (This is, perhaps, the grisliest turn “Top of the Lake” has sprung on its audiences to date: The camera never lingers on the poor girl’s waterlogged corpse, but what we do see of it is utterly stomach-churning.)

Running concurrent to Robin’s investigation of the girl’s death are her attempts at reaching out to her daughter, Mary (Englert), a routine topic of discussion back in season one now introduced properly as a character in season two; Robin has to get by Mary’s adopted parents, Pyke (Leslie) and Julia (Kidman), to make contact, and after getting over that hurdle, she winds up needing to protect Mary from harm by way of her boyfriend, Alexander, aka “Puss” (Dencik). Turns out that the dead girl worked at the same brothel maintained by Puss, which puts Mary smack dab in the center of Robin’s case. It isn’t enough, is it, for Robin to develop a relationship with her daughter and, in so doing, confront the gang rape in which Mary was conceived anew? No: Mary has to be an integral component of “China Girl’s” driving turmoil, too.

This is only where the show’s undisciplined mien starts, of course, and if Campion had left it at that, I can only imagine that “China Girl” would be drastically improved. But nonsense piles up from there, each episode mounting  into an altogether unwieldy block of television. Eventually, Al Parker (David Wenham), Robin’s New Zealand superior from season one, graces the screen with his presence, and “China Girl” takes a nosedive into unbelievable farce for the whole of his cameo; it’s an insult to us, the viewers, watching the scenario unfold before our eyes in a state of rapidly increasing incredulity, and it’s an insult to Robin, whom Campion treats as something of a punching bag this go-round. Robin is meant to be the smartest person in any room she walks into. Al, a sleazy, scummy wretch of a man, outwits her in half the time it takes for one’s jaw to drop at the ease of his cunning. (Put it this way: If “Sicario” bugged you by dint of its treatment of its female lead, “China Girl” will make you want to tear your hair out.)

Moss is done no favors by the scripts she works from, but any Moss is, more often than not, good Moss; she’s on point here, not enough that she salvages “China Girl” from its own ridiculousness but enough that she makes its painful melodrama tolerable. That she’s supported by a truly great troupe of actors helps, though Englert is so good as Mary that she almost upstages Moss in each of their scenes together. Mary is quite a character, rebellious and caustic but never grating, even as she strikes us as ungrateful; her malcontent is justified, and manifests through sharp barbs at Julia delivered with a matter of factness that almost feels gentle. (This should remind everybody that Englert is accomplished not simply because she’s Campion’s child, but because she’s a very, very good actress; if you need further reminding, go check out “Ginger & Rosa,” or track down this year’s “The Rehearsal.”)

Kidman, for her part, has little to do here other than grouse and mope and wear Julia’s wounds on her sleeve; she’s served least in “China Girl,” with Leslie and Christie receiving much juicier material to work with. (As “China Girl’s” default comic relief, or what passes as comic relief in a show like “Top of the Lake,” Christie is a hoot, but it’s her prickly and eventually tender bond to Moss that best showcases what she’s capable of as an actress. She’s physically commanding, but here her warmth is what carries her.) But they’re all acting in pursuit of a gallimaufry of themes and plot points, each inelegantly colliding with one another from one chapter to the next. As in season one, “China Girl” emphasizes gender imbalances in social and professional planes, and as in season one, “China Girl” functions by letting its flawed and damaged women struggle through their damage, the scars left on them by their relationships and by the world itself. But Campion, for reasons I can’t really unpack, misses opportunities at mining those scars for best effect. Mary is aware, for instance, that she is the child of a rape; Robin doesn’t have to carry out the hideous task of revealing the truth of Mary’s conception.

It might be for the better that she doesn’t, but it’s hard not to feel cheated by “China Girl” and its habit of dodging challenging, dramatically satisfying set-ups and sacrificing equally satisfying payoffs. It’s a problem that Alexander is an inconsistently compelling antagonist; at times he’s so smug in his misogyny that we want nothing more than for Robin to slug him. At others, he’s just a cartoon character. It’s a problem, too, that Campion has lost a portion of her faith in Robin and discarded her trust in her skill as a director. But it’s a bigger problem that “China Girl” denies us the pleasures we expect from “Top of the Lake” after its triumphant premiere: The slow burning approach to building narrative and constructing mystery, the simple, clean, startlingly naturalist style of screenwriting. It looks beautiful, I’ll give it that, but the beauty is an echo of what should be the equal of its progenitor. [C-]

“Top Of The Lake: China Girl” begins on Sunday night on SundanceTV.