The Lost Daughter
Maggie Gyllenhaal (2021)
The lead character’s name is Leda and she’s from Leeds. Written down, this seems like a daft joke but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film is soon no laughing matter, though it’s often witty – thanks especially to its star, Olivia Colman. At first, her presence seemed to reassure the large audience for this screening of The Lost Daughter in the Royal Festival Hall that all would be well. After a while, the chuckling stopped.
In Netflix’s The Crown, Colman came across as a fine actress miscast. Her first go at a queen of England was a great success (despite the film it was in) but Queen Anne – at least as The Favourite portrayed her – was loopy and emotionally needy, which suited the performer playing her. Elizabeth II, as far as we know, is neither eccentric nor brittle. Perhaps she does have natural warmth and humour but, if so, they’re rarely apparent and she’s too well trained to give the impression of keeping them in check – as Colman, who has these qualities in abundance, does in The Crown. She often seemed (whereas the excellent Claire Foy in the first two series never seemed) to be doing an imitation of the present monarch, albeit an imitation always interesting to watch and occasionally effective. The Queen does look to be enjoying herself when she’s around horses and it’s no coincidence that one of Colman’s best bits in The Crown comes when Elizabeth and her racing manager visit stud farms in France and America to learn about different methods of racehorse breeding. In this episode, Olivia Colman was able to be the Queen and more herself at the same time. All this might suggest she’ll be even less well suited to the role of Leda Caruso – a far from likeable academic, who freely admits to being selfish and tends to shut herself off from others. Yet The Lost Daughter proves to be a triumph of imaginative casting on the part of Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Gyllenhaal, directing her first feature, also wrote the screenplay, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel (originally published as La figlia oscura). I’ve not read it but I see that Gyllenhaal’s Leda has inherited from the book her name and profession, but not her nationality. Ferrante’s protagonist is Italian, so too the small coastal town where, in the novel, Leda is holidaying alone. Gyllenhaal has moved the action to a Greek island (the film was shot on Spetses). She and Colman create a convincing sense of what it’s like being on your own in a strange place and in a position to observe the daily routines of others there. On the beach where she reads and sunbathes, Leda, a professor of comparative literature at a US university, gets interested in a Greek- American family spending time with relatives on the island – particularly interested in young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson), her daughter Elena (Athena Martin), and Elena’s beloved doll. When the little girl goes missing from the beach, Leda calmly reassures Nina that Elena, wearing her mother’s floppy hat, will be easy to spot. While the family is frantically searching for her, Leda goes into woodland behind the beach, where she sees the floppy hat moving. She returns Elena to her tearfully relieved and grateful mother. Leda then steals the child’s doll, which she hides in her rented apartment.
Getting inside this difficult woman and finding empathy with her, Olivia Colman delivers one of her best performances. She makes splendid use of her comic timing in the tart one-liners fired by Leda at the various people who irritate her – but these remarks start to leave an unpleasant aftertaste, it seems in Leda’s mouth as well as the viewer’s. Without being self-loathing, she’s very aware of not being a nice person. The distinct traces of a Yorkshire accent are a good idea: Leda’s flat vowels serve to convey her caustic temperament. Yet the character develops in the course of the story, as Leda is forced to reflect on her deficiencies as a mother – she has two grown-up daughters, Bianca and Martha – and the emotional legacy of leaving them for three years, when they were seven and five respectively, to pursue her scholarly interests. In tandem with this, Leda is gradually unnerved by the course of events on the island, reflected in contrasting examples, near the start and near the end of the film, of her do-not-disturb attitude. On the beach, Nina’s elder sister, Callie (Dagmara Domińczyk), asks Leda to move her deckchair so that the family members can all sit together: Leda, calmly intransigent, refuses. Later on, when she goes to a cinema and a rowdy group of youths in the front row ruin her viewing of the film (George Stevens’ Giant?), Leda gets almost hysterically angry.
The narrative never drags but it feels artificially protracted, as though the source material was a short story (and Ferrante’s novel/la is only 130 pages). Extended flashbacks to the early years of Leda’s motherhood are very well played – Jessie Buckley is the younger Leda, Robyn Elwell and Ellie Mae Blake are the infant Bianca and Martha – but lack a life of their own. They’re, rather, illustrations of the central theme – the conflict between Leda’s career and home life, and of the former gaining the upper hand. It doesn’t help that the male character representing each domain is thin – a quality reinforced by Jack Farthing’s shallow, showy playing of Leda’s partner (and the girls’ father). As the charismatic academic who seduces her in more ways than one, Peter Sarsgaard shows far more skill but his randy professor is still a caricature. You get impatient for Gyllenhaal to return to the middle-aged Leda: it’s she and what she does in Greece that’s fascinating, and unpredictable.
The older Leda’s interactions with a couple of men on the island are more engaging, too; these, and her exchanges with Dakota Johnson’s unstable Nina, make for some strong scenes. Paul Mescal is Will, an Irish student running the beach snack bar on a summer vacation job. Leda, who likes the look of Will and enjoys their small talk, impulsively asks him out to dinner. After a few glasses of wine, she loosens up conversationally and emotionally – there’s a lovely chemistry between Mescal and Olivia Colman in this mood-lightening scene, which isn’t repeated. (Soon afterwards, Leda discovers that Will and Nina are lovers.) Ed Harris’s weathered face and piercing gaze animate Lyle, a louche-verging-on-creepy American who does various work for Nina’s family and takes a shine to Leda that’s mostly unreciprocated.
There were a couple of things I didn’t understand in an episode when Lyle arrives unexpectedly at Leda’s apartment and spends the evening there. She happens to have just taken the stolen doll from its hiding place when Lyle arrives, and doesn’t attempt to conceal it from him. Why she doesn’t is puzzling though, as another instance of Leda’s increasingly curious behaviour, it’s not implausible. Lyle’s lack of reaction when he sees the doll – as well as working for Nina’s family, he must be aware of the ‘missing’ posters for the doll they’ve posted all over the island – is also surprising. The startling and unexpected incidents in the film pave the way for The Lost Daughter’s determinedly ambiguous and unsettling finale[1].
Maggie Gyllenhaal occasionally uses a device that sticks out as designed to give the picture art-house cred: the characters’ voices are sometimes heard when their mouths aren’t moving. But she directs her actors admirably (and her child actors with particular sensitivity). She makes judicious, sparing use of Dickon Hinchcliffe’s score: the bluesy soulfulness of its main theme is most effective. The luminous yet sinister cinematography is by Hélène Louvart. This complex film is less than the sum of its parts but there’s little to complain about when some of those parts, and the lead performance, are as good as they are. It would be hard to say that Maggie Gyllenhaal, though she’s a first-rate performer, is a better actress than Rebecca Hall. As the work of a debutant writer-director screening at this year’s London Film Festival, Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter definitely has the edge on Hall’s Passing.
[1] Afternote: So successfully ambiguous that, watching the film a second time (when it began streaming on Netflix in late December 2021), I had a quite different understanding of the ending. On the first viewing, I assumed Leda had survived a personal crisis, with the question of how much or little this had affected her egocentricity left open. On the second viewing, it seemed just as likely that she hadn’t survived in any sense.
14 October 2021