Leda Caruso, a 48-year-old English professor of comparative literature, visits Spetses, a Greek island, in search of a quiet, remote workplace. There, she finds herself haunted by her past and the challenges of motherhood.
“The Lost Daughter,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut film (adapting Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name), reveals unspoken realities of parenting that mainstream cinema usually ignores. It does that through a rather simplistic and, at times, exaggerated storyline, though.
On her first day on the island, Leda (Olivia Colman) visits a nearby beach, enjoying her “working holiday,” when a Greek-American family disrupts her peace. The family’s boisterous young men and vigorous children upset her with their loud voices and bring back past memories. In particular, the sight of a young woman, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who plays but also struggles with her young daughter, makes Leda recall her own joy and frustration as a young mother of two little girls.
Gyllenhaal does an impressive job adapting the film’s direction to Leda’s point of view, which is dominated by anguish, suspicion, and regret. This first-person narrative often turns the movie into a psychological thriller since even the simplest causes (a lighthouse foghorn, some rotten fruits, an uninvited cicada, a falling pine cone) are perceived as threatening by Leda. Driven by an unknown desire, she steals the beloved doll of Nina’s daughter, which then becomes a sort of fetish for her.
“The Lost Daughter” occasionally remains elusively plotted, especially when addressing the danger that Leda feels close to the Greek-American family. This is partly because Gyllenhaal detached the protagonists from their original cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In Ferrante’s novel, both Leda and the… Italian-American family come from Naples, where the family has ties with the criminal underworld.
“Children are a crushing responsibility,” Leda quotes at some point, in a regretful tone, helped by Colman’s pathos, which captures the character’s emotional turmoil. That responsibility, combined with harsh realities, women’s desires, ambitions, fears, and the stigma of failed motherhood, is what Gyllenhaal’s creation is all about. And it delivers on what it promises.
