This way through love

“The Topps defy logic,” writes Variety in a review of The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls — winners of the audience award for best documentary at the Toronto International Film Festival. “‘On paper,’ says their comedy-writer friend, Paul Horan, ‘yodeling lesbian twins don’t really work.’ But for the better part of three decades, the Topp sisters have been gleefully defying accepted wisdom about mainstream entertainment and homophobia, and have become crew-cut demi-goddesses in a country where the national character includes a warped sense of humour. The documentary, Variety’s John Anderson says, “has you falling in love with two of the crazier people you’ve never met … gifts from New Zealand to a world that usually doesn’t pay it any attention.” “Without belaboring it, [director Leanne] Pooley lays the evidence before us and lets us draw our own conclusion: that the indefatigably cheery and witty Topp Twins got that way through love. Which they spread around, most generously through those comedic characterisations, which both puncture and massage various elements of New Zealand identity, but never without affection.”