Film review

  • The Lost Daughter

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • A Hero

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ghahreman

    Asghar Farhadi (2021)

    A man in his late thirties sits on a chair in a corridor.  A door opens, his name – Rahim Soltani – is called, and he disappears into a room.  Cut to Rahim emerging from an anonymous building and walking briskly away.  After catching a bus, he gets off seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  He clearly knows just where he’s heading, though.  He crosses a short stretch of dry, bare land and ascends numerous flights of steps erected beside a cliff covered in scaffolding; at the top he’s greeted warmly by a group of construction workers.  The accelerating movement of these opening sequences in Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero is close to exhilarating.  Without saying a word but radiating upbeat urgency, Rahim (Amir Jadidi) has made an instantly engaging impression.  You want to know more about him – and feel you like him, too.

    He has the look of a man on a mission, and so he is, but the nature of the mission comes as a surprise.  One of the men on the cliff site (later revealed to be the tomb of Xerxes in Marvdasht, in the Fars Province of Iran) is Rahim’s brother-in-law.  We learn from their conversation that the anonymous building of the earlier scene was a prison, where Rahim has already served three years for an unpaid debt.  The prison authorities have given him two days’ leave, which he plans to use well.  He accompanies his brother-in-law to the latter’s home in Shiraz, where Rahim’s sister cares for the couple’s own children and her brother’s pre-teen son Siavash (Saleh Karimai).  The household dynamic and routines, illustrated briefly but vividly, convey a sense of what Rahim is deprived of in jail.  The protagonist’s backstory is disclosed more gradually but no less efficiently.  At the same time, Farhadi gets into the meat of his narrative (as usual on his films, he has sole screenplay credit[1]).

    A traditional painter and calligrapher, Rahim was finding his livelihood increasingly vulnerable to speedier modern methods of production.  He went into business with a partner, borrowing money from a loan shark.  That loan was paid off by another, from Braham (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who owns and runs an art shop in central Shiraz, but Rahim’s business partner then ran off with the money, leaving him high and dry.  His jail sentence won’t end until he can repay Braham to the latter’s satisfaction.  With the help of his family, Rahim can now manage part-payment of the debt and hopes to persuade his creditor to accept this as sufficient.  Braham won’t have it:  as a result of loaning money to Rahim, he lost the dowry on his daughter Nazanin (Sarina Farhadi).  Rahim returns to prison.  By the time he comes out on another pass, a few weeks later, his financial situation, potentially at least, has been transformed.

    The break-up of his marriage left Rahim as single parent to Siavash.  The boy has a severe speech impediment; his father and his therapist, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), have grown close and hope to marry on Rahim’s eventual release from prison.  Farkhondeh is there to meet him when he emerges on his next parole, and has with her Rahim’s possible passport to freedom.  A handbag left on a bus and which Farkhondeh happened to find, contains seventeen gold coins, which she’s had valued:  the amount is just enough to repay Rahim’s debt entirely.  When the couple takes the coins back to the dealer who valued them, they’re dismayed to learn that gold prices fluctuate and have fallen significantly in a short space of time.

    It’s at this point that Rahim has second thoughts as to what to do with Farkhondeh’s lucky find – and that the ambiguous nature of his actions (and those of others) starts to kick in.  Before returning to jail, he posts flyers about the handbag that give his contact details (in fact, the prison phone number).  A woman who responds to the flyer is plausibly the handbag’s owner; she tearfully, gratefully reclaims it from Rahim’s sister (with whom he’s left the bag and its treasure).  The prison governor and a colleague, although they tick Rahim off for giving out the jail’s number, see in his seemingly principled actions the opportunity for some positive publicity for the prison, which is badly needed.  They make contact with journalists.  Rahim, unnerved, confesses that it was his girlfriend, not he, who actually found the bag.  The prison authorities advise him to keep quiet about this:  after all, he still rose above the temptation to cash in the gold coins.  A respected charity foundation passes round a collection plate for Rahim at one of its public meetings, where he’s invited to speak.  The charity even looks to arrange employment for him, to help him pay his debts.  He becomes a hero of broadcast and social media; then, even more suddenly, he isn’t.

    An HR man who interviews Rahim for his prospective job is immediately sceptical.  He’s heartless (and presumably meant to represent a pernicious national bureaucracy) but he’s also a dogged investigator, insisting that Rahim produce the owner of the handbag to substantiate his story.  The woman in question can’t be tracked down so Farkhondeh impersonates her.  The dyspeptic Braham, abetted by his embittered daughter, still won’t budge an inch until he’s fully reimbursed.  In exasperation, Rahim goes to the art shop to plead with Braham – to badly counterproductive effect.  Their exchange ends in blows, from Rahim, which Nazanin, who helps her father in the shop, records on her phone and posts online.  The charity gets cold feet and gives the funds raised for Rahim to a more deserving case – a woman who’ll use the money to pay for her husband’s death sentence to be commuted.  The desperate Rahim makes claims on social media that foregoing the charity’s help was another act of altruism on his part.

    The drama is both propelled and enriched by the tangled web of mixed motives, half-truths and lies that Farhadi constructs but this is also thought-provoking in a way he may not have intended:  you find yourself wondering if the intricate plotting hasn’t one or two holes.  Reviewing A Hero from this year’s Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Grand Prix), Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian objected that ‘Nobody asks Rahim the obvious question:  if he wanted to be a good citizen, why did he not simply hand the found bag in at a police station?’  The obvious response is that candidates for asking that question aren’t sufficiently disinterested to do so – neither the prison authorities nor the media want to spike a story they can profitably use.  But there is an apparent inconsistency in Rahim’s inviting public attention and, once the prison powers-that-be insist on taking things further, his nervous admission that he didn’t find the bag.  I’m not sure this is a plot flaw, though:  it’s an inconsistency only if you assume that Rahim’s attempt to attract publicity is well considered.  One of A Hero’s virtues is that queries like this don’t detract from the film.  They made this viewer feel, rather, that it will reward a second viewing.

    As in A Separation (2011), which sealed his international reputation, Farhadi expects the audience to concentrate.  You need to retain a firm idea of what has happened and been said in the earlier stages in order to compare this with later accounts given and claims made.   There’s a whiff of the school room and the exam hall about this approach – requiring that you pay attention, devising scenarios which invite an audience to analyse and form judgments on the morality of characters’ actions.  At least, there would be such a whiff if those characters were not as humanly realised, absorbing and well acted as they are.  Amir Jadidi makes Rahim an intriguing, eventually unsettling blend of affable and obstinate.  He’s a man more sinned against than sinning but you get an increasing sense that the ‘hero’ has a history of making bad decisions (he’s a career ‘bullshitter’, according to Braham).  You still root for Rahim, though.  Amir Jadidi’s dazzling smile gets plenty of use but disappears just as often.  Each disappearance causes a palpable change of mood in the scene taking place.

    Minor characters also register – like the cab driver who empathises with Rahim’s predicament (he also has served time for unpaid debts) and comes up with the unwise suggestion that Farkhondeh pretend to be the handbag owner.  For western viewers, the Iranian customs and systems described are often truly outlandish – not least a penal system in which jail terms are open-ended, and one prisoner is allowed regular mini-paroles while the wife of another pays for his reprieve from capital punishment.  In contrast, the economic changes that triggered Rahim’s financial predicament seem culturally specific yet familiar – so, too, the new tyranny of social media that governs life in a way it didn’t in A Separation or The Salesman (2016).

    According to the cast and crew details on IMDb[2], Farhadi worked with two cinematographers on the film, Ali Ghazi and Arash Ramezani.  Although the result is seamless, the predominantly restrained visuals mean that the opening, culminating in that ascent to the construction site, is memorably distinctive:  the contrast between the spring in Rahim’s step at the beginning and his final immobility is powerfully expressive.  To reveal that he ends up in the place where he started gives away everything and nothing because the film has such texture.  The fifth new fictional film I saw at this year’s London Film Festival, this one was in a different class from the preceding four[3] – in terms of story construction, thematic depth and dramatic heft.  (There isn’t any music until the closing credits:  there doesn’t need to be.)  I’m looking forward to seeing A Hero again and trying to do it fuller justice.

    13 October 2021

    [1]  The only, partial exception was his first feature, About Elly (2009), where Azad Jafarian had the ‘story’ credit.

    [2]  These are limited at present – hence the patchy efforts in this note to name supporting characters and the actors playing them.

    [3]  Afternote:  Namely Bergman Island, Last Night in Soho, Passing and The Power of the Dog.  Different class also from the four dramas I saw subsequently at the Festival, though The Lost Daughter has much to recommend it.  The other three were Azor, Benediction and Spencer.

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