THE TOPP TWINS: UNTOUCHABLE GIRLS (Leanne Pooley). 84 minutes. Opens tonight (Thursday, March 24) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Rating: NNN
Take the Indigo Girls, add some early k.d. lang – when she was doing her crazed country and western thing – then magnify it 10 times over and you have New Zealand’s Topp Twins. What’s more, these sisters have always been out lesbians and fierce political activists, and neither fact has kept them from becoming one of their nation’s most popular acts.
Canuck director Leanne Pooley‘s doc tracks how Lynda and Jools Topp went from farm girls to energetic young buskers to performers playing to thousands at major venues.
Interviews with luminaries like musician Billy Bragg, NZ satirist John Clarke and former prime minister Helen Clark unpack the Twins’ impact on the political and performance landscape.
But watch them play and all you need to know about how the Topp Twins rose to the top comes though. They often play their original songs as comedy characters they’ve created and inhabit as if they were real – like high society matrons Dolly and Prue Ramsbottom, country yokels Belle and Bell Gingham, and my favourites, Ken and Ken, two guys the duo do with uncanny skill.
In North America, entertainers seldom flaunt their passion for politics à la Topps. Pooley includes footage of the pair playing at anti-nuclear demos and actions against developments on Maori sacred land. Clark declares that without the Twins, New Zealand’s homosexual law reform could not have happened. A particularly harrowing sequence shows them at an anti-apartheid demonstration in 1981, interrupting a rugby match between New Zealand and South Africa. The fans were not amused.
The movie’s time frame gets confusing without dates on stock footage, you’re not sure what year events take place. But Untouchable Girls is a terrific tribute to a unique phenomenon.
And it’s not for lesbians only. The Topp Twins are New Zealand’s largest cultural export for good reason.
See interview with Lynda Topp
