Top Of The Lake

With its sharp writing, superior cast, evocative locations, seductively seamy subject matter and delicious performances, Top of the Lake is decidedly back in a major way. After these two appetizers, you want the rest of the meal right away.

Some of the most mesmerizing hours of television all year. [15 Sep 2017, p.66]

Not everything entirely adds up during the very winding course of China Girl’s six hours. ... The performances, however, are uniformly on target. Kidman, part of the recent ensemble in HBO’s Emmy-nominated Big Little Lies, is even more impressive here as the possessive, high-strung Julia while Dencik completely inhabits the role of thoroughly oily “Puss.” Moss again is impressively nuanced as the unsteady Robin, whose flaws and needs are palpable.

The acting is tremendous across the board, as is the directing. Quiet and meditative throughout, China Girl is gorgeously photographed.

Pregnancies, parenthood and the costs of family ties: These are the matters that Top of the Lake injects with both urgency and hope. It’s a potent, and at times deeply poetic, concoction.

China Girl manages to capture what made the original Lake so haunting, but also finds new and thrilling ways to surprise you. It took several years to come to fruition, and it was well worth the wait.

Characters alive enough to care for. (Alive enough that you would prefer they think a minute and make the smart decision, even at the price of writing the series out of existence. Mostly they won't, fortunately, but sometimes they will--also fortunately.) Once you're in it, you're in for the duration.

For all of China Girl’s didacticism, it has great characters, a mischievous sense of humor, grace notes. ... Scenes bristle with rousing intellectual energy.

Some of this symbolism can come off as rigid or obvious, to the point that Campion and Lee miss the unscripted messiness of human behavior, but it never dilutes the power of her style or the story itself.

It doesn’t quite stack up to the original, in part because the lake town itself was such a huge part of the first series, in part because some of the coincidences that drive both stories play more convincingly in a small community than in a big city. But the acting is remarkable.

With great performances and writing, it can feel a bit Scrooge-ish to come down on the elements of China Girl that don’t work. It’s an undeniably good show, it’s just not quite the home run of season one.

While the first two episodes of Top of the Lake focus on Robin’s complicated, unfortunate past, the clues in the murder story unfold very slowly--probably too slowly for American audiences--but when they finally do, the series, directed by Jane Campion (“The Piano”), picks up some steam.

The coincidence-laden plot, the floating suitcase, a few moments of character inconsistency and a really bad, mad decision on how the series ends, cannot be overlooked, of course, but these are far outweighed by the overall power of the series, the strength of the performance and most of all what Campion wants us to understand about identity and expectations of others.

It’s a shame the story doesn’t fully work, because some of the acting in Top of the Lake: China Girl is top of the line. I love the cast, even when the script fails them and they’re forced to make illogical scenes work.

Top of the Lake isn't among the cream of that crop. For starters, the plot hinges on strained coincidences and hackneyed relationships, and there's really not much of a mystery surrounding the central storyline.

China Girl takes a few plot twists to keep the murder mystery going, but it becomes obscured by the constant insults and injuries suffered by Robin. ... Moss gives a terrific performance, but it’s not enough to keep this Top of the Lake afloat.

China Girl is a more hollow simulation of that style [in the first season], a re-enactment of mood without the potency of an actual mood. The rural mystique and literary flare of Season 1 are replaced with urban brutality and sad nonsense.

This one lacks the original’s intuitive sense of rhythm and organization, and often seems more scattered and digressive than multilayered. And instead of letting feminist themes emerge organically from its situations, it stuffs them into every nook and cranny of every scene, mostly via dialogue instead of the sorts of hypnotically intense, even primal images that distinguished the original.

This narrative passiveness scans less as psychosexual critique than as a case of writers getting lost in a thicket of obligatory happenstance.