Top Of The Lake

 

There I was, the other day, struck by the thought that I hadn’t had Elisabeth Moss’s face in front of me on a big screen in a long time.  Mad Men was ages ago, and we are a while off another season of Handmaid’s Tale, though the memory of the excellence of series three is still a tingling sensation.  With recent government curbs on demonstration and their response to violence against women, we are another step closer to Gilead anyway, so we’ll all be blessing the fruit in no time.  Under his eye, indeed.  This brought me to click on Top Of The Lake on Netflix, a Moss-fronted drama that aired on the BBC back in 2013.  It looked rainy and gritty, promising some crimes perpetrated against a backdrop of luscious scenery and I felt safe in the knowledge I would have a strong performance from such a gifted actor in the lead role.

The first series is set in New Zealand, which is something I had somehow missed.  This isn’t Yorkshire (I was imagining Happy Valley vibes) but Lake Wakatipu at the bottom of South Island.  You can imagine my surprise, then, when Moss whips out a Kiwi accent.  It sounds decent to me, but from my perspective on the other side of the world, I realise I have no credibility to judge.  Moss plays Robin Griffin, returning to her home community from Sydney (which nicely covers an irregular vowel sounds anyway).  She’s in the police, sort of coming and going in a role to do with sexual assaults.  It’s hard to be sure if she’s on a working trip or not.  Her mum is unwell, but she almost ignores her to re-tread the paths of her own traumatic youth there, making it clear that she left for a very firm reason.  In a bit of a busman’s holiday, a local girl goes missing, and there are many suspicions of foul play, so Moss is in her element as the strong female and only capable police officer, dealing with an avalanche of male incompetence and insouciance as she tries to right the wrongs in her own community.

Before long, every character is a suspect, and this is because everyone is awful.  Unlikeable characters loom as large throughout as the spectacular scenery, but we are drawn in as Moss dashes in the drizzle from riddle to riddle.  There’s even a strange women’s commune set up beside the lake in shipping containers, riling some of the local populace but mostly sitting about drinking tea.  The climax gripped me with not only its gruesomeness, but its plausibility among a group of lakeside settlements who treat the most vulnerable in their society as expendable commodities.

Come 2017, the standalone conclusion is overturned as a second season appears.  The action has moved to Sydney, so our only point of continuity is Robin Griffin herself.  Still carrying the (additional) trauma of her previous lake-based experience, she now has new vulnerable girls to protect.  There are the South East Asian young women working in the licensed sex industry, branching out into further ways of selling their bodies.  There’s also the now-teenage daughter that Robin had given up for adoption.  She’s mixed up in these brothels, it turns out, rebelling against her adoptive parents (including a Nicole Kidman with little to do but have distracting hair) by pursuing a relationship with a vile German man who specialises in looking after stray cats better than he treats his sex workers.

Being strange throughout, Game Of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie is our cop partner, clashing with Robin in various ways, while we sort of wobble through a sequence of events to our climax.  The unlikability of everyone far exceeds series one’s motley crew of characters, and this made it a bit of a slog to get through.  Everything was gross, but not quite grotesque enough to be a reason to be compelled.  I stuck with it for the sake of dear Elisabeth, covering for patchier performances.  On many an evening, clicking next episode felt like more of a duty than a treat, especially in a world of so much else to watch (bonjour, Lupin).

While this might not sound like the strongest recommendation, Top Of The Lake is still important viewing.  As a slagger-off of TV despite never having produced any, I should confess I am deep in the Introduction To Screenwriting term of a part-time Creative Writing MA I am doing.  I think we can all agree the quality of my prose needs professional help.  I also have a new-found respect for anyone who writes anything on telly.  A fellow course-member (on Teams of course – I have never met these people) pointed out to us that Top Of The Lake is a great example of a female story structure.  I think this is part of feminist literary theory, but our hero’s treatment within the show follows a different arc to what we see in the hegemonic male stories of our culture.  This is all a bit academic so let’s focus on the easy bits.  This is a strong female character, leading storylines that make us question how women are viewed and treated by our societies.  It’s not pretty, but it’s more relevant than ever.

The Handmaid’s Tale

One of the best dramas of 2017 slipped onto our screens almost unnoticed.  The internet was abuzz with teasers and trailers and stills of this long-awaited adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel.  The author herself could barely contain her excitement in her social media feeds, and rightly so.  But, I asked myself, what on earth is this Hulu thing it was going to be appearing on?  Did I need another subscription alongside Amazon Prime, Netflix and Sky?  But we don’t have it here, so what about people in the UK?  How were we going to watch it?  This, in itself, was a reminder of how long we used to have to wait for entertainment to reach our shores from North America until the internet made most things immediate.  At the last minute, Channel 4 acquired the rights and with little ado, the show made its Sunday evening debut.

I’ve talked before of that final hour of Sunday being a key slot for comfort programming: nostalgic period pieces or luscious footage of natural history.  Snuggled on sofas, we’re at our most vulnerable and will do anything to soften the blow of Monday morning.  The Handmaid’s Tale was having none of it.  Every harrowing moment brought the crushing reality of how awful life can be straight to every Sunday evening viewer.  Suddenly, the TV boxset was a terrifying place.

Atwood has pointed out that there is nothing in The Handmaid’s Tale that isn’t already happening somewhere in the world.  When I first read the novel, it was the very feasibility of Gilead, a religious-fundamentalist state where parts of the USA used to be, that chilled me the most.  I couldn’t shake the concept.  In it, women are objects to be possessed in service to men.  The entire system is based on faith.  It’s over thirty-two years since publication (and twenty-seven years since a 1990 feature film adaptation where everyone’s hair was too big) and faith still abounds in the modern world as a tool to excuse all sorts of reprehensible behaviour.  If enough people believe something, then it must be right, right?

I’ve managed to get to the fourth paragraph without saying dystopian, but it’s the essential descriptor here: in this dystopian vision of the future, (wo)mankind’s fertility is running out.  Handmaids, as the last remaining group that can bear children, are envied by barren women and punished for their fecundity by both genders.  Love doesn’t come into it, as they are assigned to wealthy and powerful childless couples, solely for the purpose of conceiving, birthing and giving away their progeny in a series of ceremonies that display inconceivable brutality.  Yet, in real life, inconceivable acts are justified by faith every day.  So far, so hauntingly realistic.

Our focus is Offred/June, a Handmaid who cannot reconcile her role in Gilead’s society with the life she had before.  The drama is deftly woven with flashbacks to the breakdown of America, the somehow plausible emergence of Gilead through a gradual erosion of women’s rights.  Nothing is ever explained properly.  Instead, we are granted the credit to piece together this society and culture from the evidence presented.  As such, we share June’s horror as she peels back layer after layer of cruelty.  It is Elisabeth Moss’s outstanding performance that heightens not just the credibility of each scene, but the acute suffering June must go through as she becomes Offred.  Yet, she never lets us in that far.  We must guess her next move as much as any other character must, which prevents The Handmaid’s Tale, thankfully, from ever descending into mundane predictability.

The supporting cast is studded with further quality.  Yvonne Strahovski plays the wife to whose family Offred is assigned and bristles with the internal conflict her Handmaid’s role causes her.  The other Handmaids each invite untold curiosity: cruelty begets cruelty.  In addition, Amanda Brugel as the household’s Martha (multipurpose maid, also barren) positively seethes with quiet dignity.  So, not only is the concept utterly gripping, its execution is almost faultless.  My only niggle is that a lot of bumping into each other takes place in Gilead, as if there is only one shop or something, but I will honestly forgive this programme anything.

The medium of a ten-part series has allowed the show’s makers to mine the book’s material in order to expand and enrich the universe Atwood first created.  Carefully teased into tense drama that hooks a viewer within minutes only never to let them go (a housemate got totally sucked into the sixth episode after walking into the room ten minutes in), Channel 4 had an absolute touch sneaking this into their schedule.  And it turned out to be one of their highest rating shows of the year.  The teasing out has paid off as a second season is in the works, so I can only beg as many people as possible to make sure they have seen the first ten episodes before more are unleashed on us.  This show and what it has to tell us cannot go unnoticed.