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Top of the Lake

created by Jane Campion

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Mar 05, 2023
Category: Drama

Jane Campion created “Top of the Lake” and directed several episodes, and that’s where any piece about this 7-episode BBC series needs to start. In 1993, she was the first female filmmaker to receive the Palme D’Or at Cannes for “The Piano.” She got an Academy Award nomination as Best Director for that film and won for Best Original Screenplay. In 2021, she won the Best Director Academy Award for “The Power of the Dog.” It’s fair to say that “icon” applies here. [You can stream each episode of “Top of the Lake” for $2.99, or get the package for $17. To make your choice on Amazon Prime, click here.]

The series is set around Queenstown on New Zealand’s South Island. (Campion was born in New Zealand and still spends part of the year there in what she calls a “hut.”) Some of “The Lord of the Rings” was filmed here; this area’s all about grand, mythic scale. And variety. In one image, you can see New Zealand’s second largest lake, vast snow-tinged mountains and, along the shore, waves of grass. It’s here, set against stunning and wild nature, that we find the fictional town of Lake Top.

“Top of the Lake” starts as a thriller. Twelve-year-old Tui Mitcham, fully clothed, walks into the lake. She’s pulled out, examined, found to be five months pregnant. Who’s the father? She won’t say. And then she disappears.

A traditional thriller? Not in any way. In a Jane Campion story, put people next to Nature, and there’s no contest. Nature works. People are dysfunctional — and the further they get from civilization, the more dysfunctional they become.

The dysfunction runs along gender lines. Lake Top is a town where all the police are male — indeed, where everyone powerful is male. But Robin Griffith (Elizabeth Moss), a local who’s now a policewoman living in Australia, is back in town to care for her dying mother, and it seems smart to add her to the police team looking for Tui.

Not that the police are looking hard. It’s cold in the mountains, and the chief quickly decides she’s dead. Robin not only believes she’s alive, she sees Tui as a crime scene. Someone raped her; if she won’t say who, a DNA test will. And then there’s the basic human factor: if she is alive and hiding out, she’s not prepared to give birth.

Robin has many likely suspects, but you’ll be drawn to Tui’s father, Matt Mitcham, and his three sons, Mark, Luke and John. (And, yes, they are Matt’s disciples.) Matt’s on a rampage. A group of women has bought some lakeside land he had an option to buy. Sacred land — his mother’s buried there. But these women have hauled storage containers here and created an impromptu community they call Paradise. They even have a guru of sorts in GJ, a cryptic, grey-haired Holly Hunter (who won a Best Actress Academy Award for “The Piano,” which Campion directed.)

Matt calls these women “unfuckable.” (Like most of these women care — as one says to another, “You ever try masturbating? It’s very relaxing and not fattening.”) The incessant sexual tension that men generate underscores Campion’s conceit that almost every male in town is, literally, a prick. But do not think for a second that she’s setting up a neat gender story, with men as villains and women as saints. The Paradise community is a “half-way recovery camp for women in a lot of pain.” These are women struggling to become whole. Some, addicted to male power, don’t make it — one, a sex addict, goes into the bar in town and slaps a $100 bill on the bar for any man who will fuck her in seven minutes or less.

So it’s complicated. And heavily accented — even in the preview you may not get everything that’s said. Here’s the preview. 

“Top of the Lake” is often shocking. One minute you’re watching ravishing scenery, the next a scene of sudden violence. There are plot twists to spare, and not all of them make sense. But at every turn, you’re seeing a different look at old thriller standbys: murder, male privilege, secrecy.

In January 2013, “Top of the Lake” became the first television series to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. The theater was packed with Elizabeth Moss and Jane Campion fans. The theater was also cold as a barn, with plumbing that didn’t work. But after the intermission, no one left. And when it was over, after six intense hours, there were cheers.

BONUS VIDEO AND A HOLLY HUNTER INTERVIEW

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