Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut feature The Lost Daughter, starring Olivia Coleman, Dakota Johnson and Jessie Buckley, is now available to stream on Netflix
The Lost Daughter follows Leda, a university professor on a summer holiday break in Greece. Spending her days lounging and working on the beach, she becomes entranced by a young mother and the relationship she has with her young daughter. Both also spend every day at the beach with their loud and disruptive family. The bond that she sees between the young woman and her daughter reminds Leda of her own relationship with her two daughters, now grown women. She is confronted with the consequences of the choices she made when she was a young mother.
The Lost Daughter is a poignant story about motherhood. It is a masterful debut feature adapted and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, with mesmerizing performances from Olivia Coleman as Leda, Jessie Buckley as the younger Leda, and Dakota Johnson as the beautiful and compelling young mother Nina.
Leda is a 48-year-old professor of comparative literature who has gone on holiday alone, her suitcase filled with books. As she watches Nina with her daughter and the rest of her loud family, who appear to be also a little dangerous, Leda remembers her own relationship with her daughters when they were but little girls. Leda's experience of early motherhood is that of exhaustion and exasperation as she tried to both pursue her career and raise two girls.
It is rare to find a cinematic adaptation of a novel that stays true to its original source. The only difference apparent here is that the story is transposed from Italy to Greece, and the protagonists are no longer Italian and Neapolitan, but English and American. Maggie Gyllenhaal has managed with her debut feature to not only stay faithful to the storyline written by Ferrante, but also to its style and mood. Like the book, the film remains an intimate portrayal of motherhood. The camera, mostly handheld, stays close to its subject. There is a proximity to the camera that feels intimate, just like Ferrante's words as Leda the narrator makes the reader feel. The film captures Leda's fascination with Nina, in the use of close-ups that suggests a kind of visceral connection between the two women. This is also due to the chemistry between Coleman and Johnson, a sort of seductive pull.
Reading Ferrante's novella, I personally did not relate to the narrator, and in a sense I did not like her at all, but I was enraptured by the way she described her state of being, her state of mind, as a mother in such an unflinching, unapologetic and brutal way. In Gyllenhaal's film, there is a sense of understanding, perhaps because as the director has stated herself, the novella spoke to her, to a secret piece of herself as a mother. I see the character of Leda in a different light through Gyllenhaal's film. With Coleman's interpretation of her, Leda has become this character who rebels against any sort of disruption that is imposed on her. She refuses to move when Nina's disruptive family asks her to on the beach. She shouts at the loud group of young kids in the movie theater. It is the struggle to have her own individual self be respected, or perhaps just acknowledged, recognized, much like the internal conflict she faces in early motherhood.
The Lost Daughter is a magnificent adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novella. This is due to Gyllenhaal's thoughtful screenplay and direction, Hélène Louvart's beautiful images and some truly remarkable performances. The film also stars Ed Harris, Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Mescal and Dagmara Dominczyk.
