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Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017)
Gorgeous and necessary
This is a little cryptic but I don't want to give anything away, just watch it.
Grim might be the most convenient word to describe this series. It is, however, anything but. Perhaps seedy would be the mood but the destination is a wider affirmation of motherhood in all forms. Motherhood also means resolution which a mini series such as Top of Lake takes full advantage of--a relief from abusive cliffhangers that make a mediocre TV show seem wonderful. The script is dense with double entendres that operate as both a source of suspense of unverified premonitions and of emotional nuance between caregivers, bodies, mothers and of course their children. Comedy also finds it's place thanks to the almost terrifying delicacy of Gwendoline Christie's performance. Visually, the series is indulgent: we see more than we want to see from hallucinations, to nightmares, to daydreams which miraculously, give nothing away. What is left is a handful of deep characters played by a group of actors that render human complication innate.
All this to say, how did we get to all these points when I thought I was watching a police procedural? Bravo!
Also what's with Elisabeth Moss and plot lines around babies?
Love (2015)
Forget the marketing and chatter, there is a real film here.
The script is laughable and the acting (often voice-over), too. The 3D sex is well marketed. And yes, during certain scenes people got up and left. Yet. The film doesn't argue to be anything beyond a meandering stroll into the gallows melancholy. And it does this very very well. The film features no highbrow intellectual conversations but instead, favors the same lines you've probably slung at your lovers. Again and again and again. Just like the sex you've had with your lovers again and again and again. You know their bodies and you know how to please them and above all, you know how to hurt them. Sorrow. There's a resplendent simplicity here that hypnotizes the viewer.
You hear music banging inside the club, yet the lovers are outside in halflight. Having sex, obviously. This is a good image of what this film surprisingly achieves best: intimacy. And it fights for that with it's magnificent camera-work and editing.
But what would this review be if it didn't talk about the 3D sex? Love and cinema are inseparable. Love stories are why you stick glued to a chair for a couple of hours. Raw sex is part of love, yet, films used to cut to birds necking after a kiss. Then it became steamy windows. Signs, metaphors, analogies, semiotic nausea. And here, Noé takes that away which makes the film even coarser, and ultimately more brutal.
I wanted to write this review because the whole marketing ("finally a love story restricted for -16) and shock value (an eye-rolling warning in the opening credits) have cheapened what this film has achieved and I encourage viewers to look beyond.