The Lost Daughter (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Alex Ramon

Produced by Charles Dorfman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Osnat Handelsman-Keren, Talia Kleinhendler; written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, adapted from Elena Ferrante's novel; edited by Affonso Gonçalves; cinematography by Hélène Louvart; music by Dickon Hinchliffe; starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Dagmara Domińczyk, Peter Sarsgaard, and Ed Harris. Color, 121 min. A Netflix release.

In her 2003 book, Cinema’s Missing Children, Emma Wilson describes Jane Campion’s 1996 adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady as “a feeling response to the novel, a response embodied in close attention to bodily contact, surface and space, and to the lived experience of femaleness as rapture, adventure and tragedy.” Wilson’s description might also be applied to a new female-directed literary adaptation: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, adapted from Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel La figlia oscura (translated into English in 2008).

Joining actress peers such as Regina King (with One Night in Miami [2020]), Romola Garai (Amulet [2020]), and Rebecca Hall (Passing [2021]) in making a recent move behind the camera, Gyllenhaal (the daughter of screenwriter Naomi Foner and director Stephen Gyllenhaal) crafts in her debut feature an adaptation that, though flawed, proves distinctively fluid, sensitive, and supple in conveying the perceptions and shifting consciousness of a female protagonist reckoning with her past and present choices. As its title suggests, this tactile, haunting film also resonates with the broader themes of Wilson’s study, which examines the representation of missing, absent, or otherwise endangered children in 1990s and early-2000s cinema, a trope which surfaces in The Lost Daughter’s exploration of ambivalent attitudes toward motherhood.

Since her breakout role as the troubled, submissive, but finally liberated Lee in Steven Shainberg’s Secretary (2002), Gyllenhaal’s choices as an actress have often been notably daring. With her distinctive voice, expressive physicality, and vibrant presence, she has brought to life a range of unusual, complicated heroines. From Happy Endings (2005), Sherrybaby (2006) and The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) to her TV appearances in The Honorable Woman (2014) and The Deuce (2017-19) (in which, at the actress’s urging, her sex worker character developed into a filmmaker), Gyllenhaal’s selection of screen roles has seldom felt constrained by concerns over image or “likability.”

As such, The Lost Daughter feels consistent with her acting work. The first English-language adaptation of a Ferrante text, the film’s focus is on the uningratiating Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman), whom Gyllenhaal’s screenplay renders not as the Italian native of the novel but rather as a middle-aged, British-born, U.S.-based Comparative Literature professor and translator holidaying alone in Greece. (The picture was shot on the island of Spetses). Leda is distracted from the work she’s brought along by the arrival at the beach of an obstreperous Greek American family whom she views at first with disdain and later with interest, as she zeroes in on a younger woman in the group, Nina (Dakota Johnson), and her small daughter Elena. (Leda initially incurs the family’s ire by refusing to move from her spot on the beach to accommodate their party.) When Elena momentarily goes missing at the beach, and is found by Leda, the two women are brought together—Leda seeing in Nina a vision of her own past struggles as a young mother of two, and Nina constructing Leda as an example of self-sufficient womanhood that contrasts with her own current condition of stressed-out entrapment.

Much invested in the intricate dynamics of women watching, appraising, and thinking about other women (including, in Leda’s case, her past self), The Lost Daughter’s present-day sequences explore what Wilson, drawing on the work of Jackie Stacey and Teresa de Lauretis, calls “intra-feminine fascination.” These scenes possess a mixture of unease, dark humor, and sensuality that is distinctive and carefully controlled—and centered primarily on the interactions of the three dark-haired female protagonists (the vital Dagmara Domińczyk completes the trio as Nina’s eagle-eyed, controlling, pregnant sister-in-law Callie). Scrupulously avoiding the kind of empty pictorialism that the luscious location could inspire, Gyllenhaal and DP Hélène Louvart instead use the setting expressively. They keep the camera close on the actors, especially Colman, in a curious, exploratory way, with point-of-view shots and close-ups designed to duplicate the first-person intimacy of Ferrante’s novel.

The early scenes of Leda’s arrival and settling in at the resort strongly evoke the delicious sense of solitude captured in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003); moreover, Leda’s prickliness as a protagonist, and her initially voyeuristic interest in the younger woman, also recall Charlotte Rampling’s role in the Ozon film, which was similarly concerned with investigating the workings of a writing woman’s mind. Alone, Leda lets down her guard, squealing with delight at her accommodation. But several intrusions—the insistent beam of a lighthouse; the appearance of a huge bug on her pillow; a pine cone falling on her (or thrown at her)—suggest threats in this particular paradise, as if the environment itself were rebelling against her presence. (Indeed, while Ferrante has been celebrated for her sympathetic perspective on the challenges of maternity, one could perceive the arc of the story as quite punitive towards its self-described “selfish,” “unnatural mother.”) From the start, Gyllenhaal shows skill in creating suspense, as the film conveys the pleasure and the sense of vulnerability experienced by a woman vacationing alone.

The twist here is that the principal transgression is Leda’s own: namely, her odd appropriation of Elena’s doll, which she secretly keeps despite observing the child’s vocal distress over its loss; this is an action that the film follows the novel in seeking neither to justify nor entirely explain. The doll nonetheless serves (at times somewhat heavy-handedly) as the text’s principal symbol: it functions as a totem of Leda’s turbulent experience of motherhood (in which her own childhood doll was thrown from a balcony during a family quarrel) and as a fetishistic way of connecting with her own daughters and commemorating the period during their childhoods when she was absent from their lives.

Despite the film’s privileging of female relationships and responses, Leda’s interactions with two male characters—both of them, like her, foreigners in this environment—are also significant. The elderly caretaker Lyle (Ed Harris) is the first person who Leda encounters on her arrival, followed by the twentysomething Will (Paul Mescal), a student who is working at the resort for the summer. While Leda’s relations with both men are not devoid of sexual or romantic tension, they are most intriguing for the nuanced qualities the film reveals they bring out in her. The men’s contrasting ages seem telling in this regard, since neither is Leda’s peer. Rather, as younger and older companions, they illuminate her past and (potential) future experiences, expressing the character’s sense of what Ferrante’s novel describes as “dancing in two different stages of [her] life.”

Leda’s attitude to the ever-solicitous Lyle can be briskly dismissive: “Can I finish my dinner?” is her brusque response to his touchingly awkward flirtatious overtures at a bar. But she later loosens up in his presence: a dancefloor encounter between them set to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer” (an inspired replacement for the book’s tango music in the same scene) is one of the film’s most memorable interludes. A taut sequence even suggests Lyle’s willingness to be complicit in Leda’s theft of the doll, such is the implied extent of his need for her affection. With Will, in contrast, Leda oscillates between girlish and more motherly modes, though the tenor of their interactions changes following her discovery of his relationship with Nina; this revelation serves to establish a further parallel between the two female protagonists, as it brings to the surface Leda’s memories of her own adultery years before.

The film falters when it comes to the flashbacks themselves: not so much a result of their integration, which is handled with exceptional elegance by Gyllenhaal and editor Affonso Gonçalves (the cut from the thrown doll is one of many sharp, unexpected transitions), but due to their variable content. Here Jessie Buckley takes over as the young Leda, whom we see trying to forge an academic career while bringing up two demanding young daughters and receiving minimal help from her similarly ambitious spouse Joe (the talented Jack Farthing, underused). Yet these sequences only offer so many variations on the theme of under-pressure motherhood and are programmatic, lacking the texture of the present-day scenes. It should be noted that Gyllenhaal, the mother of two daughters herself, works well with the little girls, Robyn Elwell (as Bianca) and Ellie Blake (as Martha), who play Leda’s daughters, and who are completely convincing. But there remains a flat, over-explicit quality to these scenes, as well as some soft-pedaling: for instance, whereas the Leda of the book slaps her daughter back when Bianca hits her, the film’s Leda does not.

The best of the film’s past sequences, because the most suggestive, features Alba Rohrwacher and Nikos Poursanidis as hikers who unwittingly alert Leda to the possibilities of life beyond the dictates of parental duty. The weakest sequence documents the start of the young Leda’s affair at a conference with her guru Professor Hardy, whom the film flagrantly idealizes as a magnetic intellectual and sexual titan. (The casting of Gyllenhaal’s real-life husband, Peter Sarsgaard, as the irresistible Prof only ups the embarrassment quotient of this romanticized characterization.) In general, the scholarly context of the film has a phony, editorialized feel: like an overeager student, Gyllenhaal makes sure that we don’t miss the literary resonances of the heroine’s name, for instance. And it doesn’t help that Buckley, so powerful as another mother attempting to reconcile career ambitions and childcare in Tom Harper’s Wild Rose (2018), is considerably less convincing here as a driven early-career academic.

It’s always a relief, then, to return to the present-day scenes in which the grammar of glances and gazes, touches and gestures, finds the film at its most eloquent, expressive, and intuitive. The shifting of the novel’s setting from southern Italy to Greece undoubtedly leads to some losses in context—and to the brief background appearances of native Greek islander characters who are no more individualized than those in Mamma Mia! (2008)—but the film’s use of the location as a space for psychological drama is exceptionally potent.

The actors all rise to the occasion here, with Gyllenhaal drawing from the ubiquitous Olivia Colman one of her freshest, most challenging performances. Colman makes Leda a fascinating, quicksilver mix of directness and defensiveness, pride and shame; the drama playing out across her face is far more compelling than what the rigged flashbacks disclose. Dakota Johnson reveals Nina’s fears, frustrations, and desires with touching delicacy, poignantly charting the young mother’s latching on to Leda as a role model and then the harsh disintegration of that idealized perception. And the wily veteran Ed Harris and newcomer Paul Mescal (of TV’s Normal People) underplay effectively to create two totally believable supporting characters who add nuance to the drama and enrich our understanding of Leda’s state of mind.

The carefully modulated performances and general ambience are further enhanced by a fine sound design and by Dickon Hinchliffe’s outstanding score, which crashes in boldly with strings, piano, and organ (and a subterranean James Brown echo) and then retreats into jazzier, more meditative moods, evoking the rhythms of the sea and of Leda’s consciousness, and leading the film to a conclusion that is equal parts bitter and redemptive. Accentuating the circular structure of the novel, the beautiful shore-set coda here has a hypervivid, waking-from-a-dream feel that is invigorating. Despite the mostly overemphatic flashbacks, then, Gyllenhaal’s “feeling response” to Ferrante’s novel has resulted in a fresh kind of contemporary women’s picture, one distinguished by its subversive insights, its visual vibrancy, and its clear-eyed compassion for all its lost or searching daughters.

Alex Ramon is a British film critic based in Poland. He writes for the British Film Institute and Sight and Sound among other outlets.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 2