Film
Topp marks
by David Larsen
The Twins have become our favourite outrageous aunts.
Ah, the Topp Twins. Unashamedly down-home country and western Kiwi fun. With yodelling. A month ago, if you’d asked me out to an evening with them – Live! On stage! – I would have declined with the cautious courtesy I generally reserve for crazy-eyed evangelists trying to save my soul on street corners.
Just about the only mistake Leanne Pooley makes in The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls, her funny, moving, richly intelligent study of the Topps’ life and times, is attempting to stare down the cultural snobs in her audience. (Yes, that would be me.) Interspersed throughout the film are moments of Serious Analysis, in which the likes of John Clarke, Don McGlashan and Billy Bragg sit po-faced before the camera and make such pronouncements as, “It could be argued that all comedy, and all art, is political.”
These (mercifully brief) interludes would be deathly even if they weren’t so redundant. Once you’ve seen the live performance clips, archival news footage, old home movies and interviews that make up the bulk of the film, you don’t need anyone to tell you about the political power of comedy. Some of the audience interactions captured here – particularly with well-to-do American tourists – are so daring they ought to produce aghast silence. What they actually produce is an almost familial sense of dispensation. No one else could say these things, but somehow the Twins, in one or another of their endlessly many on-stage personas, can. They’ve turned themselves into New -Zealand’s favourite outrageous aunts.
Pooley dives in and out of the Twins’ 25-year career, expertly developing two storylines in tandem: the lives of two fascinating and likeable women and, in the background, the changes in New Zealand society over the past three decades. It’s a remarkable piece of documentary making, starting with the choice of subject – the resonances between the Twins’ story and the larger national one are real and surprising – and extending to nearly every aspect of the film. Even the grainy older segments somehow end up looking like rough-hewn art-house material. I hate country music, I never watched the Topp Twins’ TV show, and I would climb an alp to avoid a yodel. But this is a lovely film. I wouldn’t have missed it.
THE TOPP TWINS: UNTOUCHABLE GIRLS, directed by Leanne Pooley.
A boiled egg, pure white in a white egg cup, and coffee, pure black in a white cup: perfect, pristine, oddly sterile. Stephen Daldry’s The Reader is a visually beautiful film throughout, but this opening image is one of its rare moments of visual eloquence. Look at the artificial black and white world we create for ourselves, it says. Reality is more complex than this.
Especially when you’re a 16-year-old boy seduced by an older woman who turns out to have been a Nazi. Like the Bernhard Schlink novel it adapts, David Hare’s screenplay tries to take us somewhere very dark: into a loving relationship with a Holocaust perpetrator. This would be a great and terrible achievement if it were done honestly. But the film veers away from any serious consideration of why former concentration-camp guard Hanna helped commit atrocities, focusing instead on the bad luck that leaves her framed for more crimes than she -actually carried out. We’re meant to sympathise.
Kate Winslet makes as much as she can out of Hanna, but the part allows her far too little scope: some tears, some fears, some moments of frustrated incomprehension, during Hanna’s war crimes trial, that almost, almost let us glimpse the inner workings of her mind. Much as I like Winslet, her Oscar for this role is a case of rewarding a film’s good intentions, rather than recognising a great performance. David Kross is blandly adequate as her tormented young lover, Michael. Very late in the piece – the film’s a slow, slow crawl – there’s one nuanced, powerful scene between Ralph Fiennes, playing the older Michael, and Lena Olin, playing a Holocaust survivor. It hints at what Daldry and Hare might have achieved here, had they kept their nerve.
