A Subversive Take on Motherhood: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘The Lost Daughter’ (2021) — on Netflix
Film Analysis in 10 Slides
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OSCAR NOMINATIONS
Maggie Gyllenhaal won the Golden Osella Award for Best Screenplay at Venice 2021 where The Lost Daughter premiered. Nominated for 3 Academy Awards this year, will the excellent performances by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley fetch them the Oscars for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress? Will Maggie Gyllenhaal get the award for Best Adapted Screenplay?
ADAPTATION
The film is based on the Italian novel “La Figlia Oscura” (2006) written by the cult author Elena Ferrante and translated into English by Ann Goldstein titled “The Lost Daughter” (2008). Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist whose identity is unknown.
“THE LOST DAUGHTER” THE BOOK
Leda, a middle-aged professor of English literature from Florence and a divorcee, spends her vacation in a coastal town in southern Italy. Her two daughters have left for Canada to join their father. Her peace is disturbed with the arrival of an extended Neapolitan family at the beach. Leda has to put up with this noisy bunch speaking in the dialect of her own parents from whom she escaped. She is drawn to Nina, a young mother who has a hard time taking care of her daughter Elena — like Leda had with her daughters. Elena goes missing and Leda finds her. Elena’s doll also goes missing which is taken by Leda. A flood of memories is unleashed in her about the unconventional decision she made in abandoning her young daughters and its impact on her and the family.
THE LOST DAUGHTER THE FILM
As an American film, there are some changes in The Lost Daughter. Leda is called Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman in the present and Jessie Buckley in the flashbacks), a British professor of comparative literature living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The boisterous Italian family is from Queens which takes away the menace a Neapolitan family can evoke. Leda’s Neapolitan roots are also gone and with it the commonality of the dialect with the Neapolitan family. The beach location is moved to Greece. There are some more changes in the film which mostly sticks to the novel.
STRUCTURE
The book has been written in Leda’s first-person point of view. The present seamlessly mixes with her memories of the past. Although the film is not strictly in her perspective, there are a number of shots in Leda’s point of view. The sequences in the past are in the nature of flashbacks in the beginning. Later the film shuttles between the past and the present.
THE MYTH OF LEDA
The younger Leda’s specialization on E.M. Forster in the novel is replaced by W.B. Yeats whose poetry she translates into Italian. As mentioned by Leda in the film, there is a sonnet titled “Leda and the Swan” written by Yeats. In it the poet alludes to the Trojan war triggered by the abduction of Helen who was born to Leda, consequent to her seduction and rape by the god Zeus in Greek mythology. The loss of dignity of Leda led to a future destruction. Just like Leda and Helen in the mythology, the mothers and daughters in the film are affected by the acts of men, giving some resonance to the title of the film.
THE MEANING OF THE TITLE
Watching Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter evokes the memory in Leda of peeling the orange for her young daughters. Nina loses Elena and Leda finds her. This sets off Leda’s interest in Nina and getting involved in her life. Leda remembers losing Bianca briefly when she was a kid. The title of the film makes sense in this light. Nina talks about her depression and wants Leda’s Cambridge address. Will she lose Elena just like Leda lost her daughters for three years? Leda is also a lost daughter who escaped from her mother. Elena treats the doll like her daughter and carries her like a baby. She is very unhappy to lose her. The myth of Leda and Helen seems to apply to all the mothers and daughters in the film in some way.
THE DOLL
It is to the credit of the writer Elena Ferrante and director Maggie Gyllenhaal that there is no explanation given as to why Leda filches the doll. It’s a childish act by Leda and she does it impulsively. There is the following sentence somewhere in the beginning of the novel uttered by Leda the narrator: “The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.” Leda herself doesn’t understand why she did it. She gets obsessed with the doll which drives the novel forward apart from triggering memories of the past. Leda’s mystery is retained by not explaining why she did it.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The legendary French cinematographer Hélène Louvart brings the beach scenes and the interiors alive with extreme closeups, point of view shots and hand-held camera shots. Dickon Hinchliffe’s music creates the right mood.
The film gives a perspective of motherhood as a “crushing responsibility” that demands forsaking personal identity. It portrays Leda the “unnatural mother” without making any moral judgement. The Lost Daughter is a worthy first film of the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal as director. It is a subversive take on motherhood considering that the happy family is a sacred concept in the mainstream American cinema.
