ASSORTED BEAUTIES
As a police procedural, following an ambitious female detective as she tries to protect a pregnant pre-teen girl, the miniseries Top of the Lake falls flat. There are too many artfully placed red herrings, and the mystery is resolved unconvincingly and all-at-once during the final minutes of the final show. But as an essay in different kinds of loveliness – in the natural landscape, in house interiors, and in types of people – the shows is richly satisfying. The series was filmed in remote parts of New Zealand, and the views of the lake there, the surrounding mountains, and the disturbed luminous skies, are breathtaking. The people at the lake live in cottages with blank white walls, drenched in natural light, and decorated sparingly, with roughly finished wood furniture and stuffed animal heads. The insides of the rooms feel modern and also ominous, as if danger could erupt from within. The whole setting of the story feels unearthly. I doubt the country’s tourist board could have crafted a finer fantasy.
Most memorably, Top of the Lake shows us people we don’t see very often in movies and television. There is the detective’s cancer-stricken mother, and a cultish new age leader named CJ, and CJ’s band of followers, who are all women in their 50’s and 60’s. The actresses portraying them aren’t starved and botoxed and waxed, but naturally sagging and sluggish and greying. It’s shocking to see them, and so many of them, again and again, at the center of the narrative. That’s not only because they don’t conform to the dominant ideal of what we think women should look like, but also because we don’t often see women this age in movies and television, at all. The detective’s mother, who wears her white hair in an untamed mane, is shockingly graceful. There’s also her lover, Tarangi, a maori with bronze skin, dark hair and a placid, unfathomable expression. He wears traditional ink-black markings across his forehead, like the ones Mike Tyson has. On Tarangi they’re less martial than romanticizing, emphasizing his outsider status in this rural white community. Despite that he, like the middle-aged women in the cast, are fascinating to watch. They possess a physical beauty that’s all the more powerful because we don’t see it so often, at least not on TV.