12-18 Aug 2017 guide 16by 22-year-old Alice Englert,
the real-life daughter of TotL’s
writer-director Jane Campion.
Mary has been adopted by the
infertile Julia, played by Nicole
Kidman, who had a child via
surrogate in 2010. Kidman
told an interviewer that these
parallels had been discussed
at the outset. “Jane said to me:
‘Would this be a difficult place
for you to go in terms of what the
theme of this is?’ And I said: ‘No,
because my story seemed very
different.’ Mine was agreed upon,
and it was a beautiful thing that
a woman chose to give us. It was
an incredible gift she made.”
TotL’s implicit equation of
surrogacy and prostitution is
potentially controversial, but
it’s very much in keeping with
TV’s new awareness of the
global politics of fertility. In the
economies of western cities like
Sydney, both industries involve
the individual woman’s “choice”
to commercialise her body,
which, given her financial need,
is often no choice at all. The
show’s images of young women
waiting out their 40 weeks in
the tense boredom of dormitory-
style rooms are also reminiscent
of House of Surrogates, a 2013
BBC4 documentary about the
Akanksha Infertility Clinic in
small-town India, patronised
mostly by couples from the UK,
the US and Canada, and run by
the glamorous matriarch-meets-
entrepreneur, Dr Nayna Patel.
“I knew when I first visited that
viewers would have impulsive
reactions,” says Matt Rudge, the
doc’s British producer-director.
“But what I knew the film
would do, is slowly take viewersdeeper, to meet those involved,
so that their presumptions
would ultimately be turned on
their head.” Indeed, Anand’s
surrogates receive an all-round
care package that includes advice
and coaching from Dr Patel herself
and the film also shows the life-
changing potential of the money
they make (£40 a month and
£4,000 on delivery). Yet House
of Surrogates’ depiction of a vast
global wealth gap, as well as the
careless way the bonds of baby
and birth mother are severed,
remains upsetting. Rudge believes
that our culture’s fascination with
surrogacy has less to do with the
sci-fi strangeness of the procedure,
and more to do with the emotions
involved. “Hope, disappointment,
separation, love, loss, family; in
that sense, it’s a story that goes
to the heart of being human. The
themes are universal.”
Indeed, sterility is often used
as a metaphor for the kind of
imminent environmental disaster
that really should concern
us all. That’s the case in The
Handmaid’s Tale, where the rise‘Hope, love, loss;
it’s a story thatgoes to the heart
of being human’of the new totalitarian state was
precipitated by a falling birth rate
linked to pollution, but it was also
a theme in Lost, the Channel 4
series Utopia, and the 2006 movie
Children of Men. We ignore the
ticking of Mother Nature’s own
biological clock at our peril,
because when time runs out for
her, there’s no IVF specialist on
the planet that can save us.
The new dramas, though, are
less concerned with infertility’s
environmental causes than its
emotional consequences. They
specialise in a kind of female-
specific body horror – think the
mewling foetuses in TotL’s dream
sequences, or Ofglen waking up
with a bandaged crotch in The
Handmaid’s Tale – that makes a
huge, global injustice feel deeply
personal. Just how personal?
Alice Englert says her wincingly
accurate portrayal of the cruelty
teens can inflict on their parents
(and visa versa) was not based
on true events: “Gratefully the
relationship on screen is not our
relationship!” She also describes
her co-stars Moss and Kidman
as “a very cool posse of mums”,
yet TotL’s on-screen depiction
of motherhood is much more
fraught than this easy-going
on-set atmosphere.
In made-for-TV melodramas
such as The Surrogacy Trap
(2013) and A Deadly Adoption
(2015), or Hollywood comedies
like Baby Mama (2008), it was
the surrogates who were the
problem, either too trashy or too
psychotic to be accepted into the
modern, proudly nonconformist
family unit. Now, it’s the
“commissioning” parent – and
particularly the mother – who isChild play
Alice Englert as
Mary and David
Dencik as Puss in Top
of the Lake: China GirlNIC CLEAVE/ALAMY; GEORGE KRAYCHYK/HULU