Jane Campion's 'Top Of The Lake: China Girl' With Elisabeth Moss & Nicole Kidman Gets Off To An Uneven Start [Cannes Review]

Let’s go through the checklist. 1: Jane Campion is one of my favorite working filmmakers; 2: The only other time she collaborated with megastar Nicole Kidman, she made “The Portrait Of A Lady,” which I’ll defend to all comers as the underrated masterpiece in both women’s catalogues; 3: I’ve extolled the virtues of Elisabeth Moss as an actress so much recently (especially in relation to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and most recently for her small, terrific role in Ruben Östlund‘s “The Square“) that I’m a little sick of hearing my own fawning praise; and 4: “Top Of The Lake” season 1 was one of the best TV shows I’ve watched in the last few years — knotty, atmospheric, noirish and novelistic. There was really no way “Top Of The Lake: China Girl,” which stars Moss and Kidman, was written by Campion and Gerard Lee, and was directed by Campion and Ariel Kleiman, was ever possibly going to be less than A-grade unmissable TV event for me, was there? Well, with the *massive* proviso that I’ve only seen the first two hour-long episodes of the six-episode run: umm……

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This season of the show is set some time after the events of Season 1, with Detective Senior Constable Robin Griffin (Moss) returning to Sydney, where the reputation she earned in New Zealand for solving the pedophile-ring case has preceded her. However, her demons travel with her, too, and she hears slighting references to her handling of that case in even the most innocuous remark. She does have one fan, however, in junior uniformed officer Miranda Hillmarson (Gwendoline Christie) who soon ingratiates herself into the reluctant Robin’s professional life as well as her personal one. That, too, is in tatters, with it being just four weeks after the date of her planned wedding, which she called off at the literal last second under circumstances that are revealed in an extended prologue to episode 2.

blankThere are two further strands: Robin is tortured by nightmares of glowing babies (?) apparently prompted by her desire to contact the daughter she gave up for adoption after she was gang-raped 17 years prior. That daughter is Mary (Alice Englert, Campion’s real-life daughter), who has a much older, intellectually inclined boyfriend who goes by the unlikely nickname “Puss” (David Dencik) and lives above a Chinese-run brothel (such establishments are legal in Sydney) subsisting by teaching English to the newly imported prostitutes. Mary has a frosty relationship with her adoptive mother, Julia (Kidman, looking regal and freckled under a wild corkscrew mane of gray hair), a staunch feminist who has recently fallen in love with another woman and is divorcing Mary’s gentle and forgiving adoptive father. And finally, there’s the actual murder, involving the China Girl of the title: a badly decomposed body that is washed up in a suitcase on Bondi beach, and becomes Robin and Miranda’s first case together.

The issue that exists from the first is that there appears to be a massively coincidental connection between Robin’s tortured personal life and the murder case that just so happens to fall into her lap (not to mention a secondary link between her boss and the dead girl too). And certainly in these first two episodes, her acumen as a detective seems pretty blunt: not only is she snapping at shadows, but at the end of the second episode there’s a revelation regarding the dead girl’s body which is portrayed as a massive intuitive leap on her part, when in fact it’s the very obvious (and only) explanation of the facts. These issues aren’t of themselves deal breakers — season 1 also had a good few moments when its plot contrivances showed, and other times when Robin, despite her apparently preternatural detecting skills, seemed to lag fairly far behind the average viewer in piecing together the puzzle. But what season 1 had in spades that more than compensated was a sense of place and atmosphere, of time and destiny and fate — aspects in which ‘China Girl’ feels thin and disconnected.

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There are elements that promise better things to come: the one scene that Kidman and Moss share is a sparky, angsty thing that teases a mom-v.-mom, nature-v.-nurture showdown in the near future. And Englert is particularly good at embodying Mary’s weirdness and precocious insufferable teenageriness, while Christie, though saddled with a part that so far feels a little too “wacky sidekick,” is also impressive as the awkward, enthusiastic outcast Miranda. But while individual scenes often do work, overall in its early stages the show doesn’t quite find its rhythm, a feeling not helped by some on-the-nose dialogue and the overt signposting of a lot of its themes.

Kidman’s Julia doesn’t just behave as a feminist, she “went to England to study under Germaine Greer.” The show’s investigation into misogyny is given rather cliched form by a gang of young geeks who hang out in a coffee shop working on their laptops on a site that rates hookers, while being apparently unable to strike up a conversation with a “real” woman. And the racial aspect gets no subtler treatment either: “We all look alike to you” says one Asian character, accounting for the ease with which the incoming prostitutes can travel on false passports. “Wait, do we all look the same to you?” pipes in Miranda, because no one has ever made that joke before.

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It’s still a classy package, and the filmmakers and cast alone will no doubt have me tuning back in to see how it all develops. But it feels like season 2 is missing a crucial element (perhaps a lake?) that made the weirdness of that first season, and the moroseness of Moss’ Robin, cohere into something tragic. With four more hours to go, there’s plenty of time for “Top Of The Lake: China Girl” to ripen into resonance, and there’s already a heartening dose of the eccentric, which a standard procedural would never embrace. But at the end of hour two, it left me in the last place I expected “Top Of The Lake: China Girl” to put me: in a holding pattern, waiting for the real show to begin. [Episodes 1 & 2: B-]

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