Film still of Top of the Lake: China Girl © RR
Jane Campion presents Top of the Lake: China Girl on the big screen
Jane Campion honors the festival's 70th anniversary by unveiling the highly awaited season 2 of Top of the Lake in a Special Screening and on the big screen. Four years after the airing of the captivating mini-series with equivocal characters and down-under settings, the director from New Zealand presents Top of the Lake: China Girl, codirected by Ariel Kleiman. An opportunity to catch up with detective Robin Griffin in a new police drama.
Season 1 left us with the scene of Robin (Elisabeth Moss) washing Al's bloody t-shirt in the lake. This symbolic gesture of purification, following the violence from the investigation conducted throughout the six episodes in the small town of Laketop, left us with many questions concerning the past and future of Robin, Tui and Johnno… In Top of the Lake: China Girl, the detective has just returned to Sydney, where she is trying to regain control of her life. When the body of a young Asian girl washes ashore on Bondi Beach, Robin launches an investigation with the hope of starting afresh. Her search will lead her to the darkest corners of the city, forcing her to once again face the sinister secrets buried beneath.
In 2013, Top of the Lake, season 1, was acclaimed by critics for its masterful directing, a screenplay dripping with suspense as well as the ambivalent nature of its characters, the interplay between the actors and the majestic settings. By her own admission, Jane Campion (winner of the Palme d’or in 1993 for The Piano) states she found freedom in the series to personally explore one of her favorite themes: male-female dominated relationships. Top of the Lake: China Girl promises to delve deeper into this topic thanks to the arrival of new female characters, notably those played by Gwendoline Christie, alias Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones, and Nicole Kidman, who joins forces once more with Jane Campion twenty years after her magnificent interpretation of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady.
