The Lost Daughter (2021) - Deceptive drama explores the struggles of motherhood
Credit: allocine.fr
Travelling home after a day on the beach, a woman is barred access from her car by two leering men, arms crossed over sun-tanned torsos. She doesn’t back down when taunted, but when she manages to push past them, she finds the key doesn’t fit with the lock. This is not her car and, though they might be mocking her, the men are not preventing her from leaving. Such is the tone of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s psychological drama The Lost Daughter, based on Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, set on the not-so paradisiac beaches of Greece: a sensation that all is not as it seems, a deception beautifully carried by its cinematography and actors.
Olivia Colman is Leda, a college professor and Italian translator getting some time away alone. She is quiet, at times bordering on socially inept, marking papers on the beach and pursuing no company, even when it is offered in the form of Paul Mescal’s kind beach assistant Will or Ed Harris’ Lyle, the hotel caretaker. She is however drawn to a loud family who take over the otherwise deserted beach she spends her days on, particularly Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Elena. Leda immediately feels for the young mother, having struggled herself to balance family life and work at her age: played by an outstanding Jessie Buckley, young Leda constantly battles with her two daughters, Bianca and Martha, longing for something more than having her hair brushed and reducing childcare to taking turns with her husband (Jack Farthing). When Elena goes missing, Leda finds her, and develops a friendship with Nina and her family. But it is all too close to home for her: when Elena loses her doll and becomes more and more agitated, Nina turns to her for help, and Leda is forced to confront her darkest secret.
There is an imminent sense of danger surrounding Leda, whether it is Elena suddenly going missing and the entire beach spreading out to look for her, or Nina’s family, who Will tells Leda between gritted teeth are “bad people”. She feels watched everywhere she goes: on the beach, where Nina and her family watch her from a distance, and even in her holiday home, where Lyle is always lurking and where she has to crouch under the window so as not to be seen from outside. One wonders why she doesn’t just leave the resort, but Leda is gutsy, resilient, determined not to be bothered (she refuses one of Nina’s family member’s requests to relocate at the other end of the beach so that the family can stay together). And yet, though she remains rooted in place, Leda is bothered, distressed by the memories Nina and Elena’s relationship brings back to her, by the eerie resemblance between what she witnesses unfold on the beach and her past.
The Lost Daughter explores the taboos of motherhood, the hushed whispers of “she’s driving me crazy” without nonetheless revealing too much. Gyllenhaal cleverly plays with expectations, setting a suggestive flashback against present times, leaving red herrings (even the title is one) weighed down by Leda’s increased feelings of discomfort as she watches Nina love and struggle with her daughter. Colman is excellent, perfectly embodying a continuous awkwardness that renders her a mixture of unlikeable and empathetic: too quick to stick to her guns, she often retracts her words, offering up measly apologies for her standoffishness, or worse, attempts clumsy flirtation before running away like an embarrassed child. Yet always, it appears as though she either wants to laugh or cry, exemplifying the dichotomy between both loving and fearing, staying put and running.
After such heightened drama and tension, the ending of The Lost Daughter is surprisingly a little understated. But then this is also perhaps the point: with Gyllenhaal playing to the audience’s sense of impending doom, she instead leaves Leda at a bittersweet ending, a learning curve for her older, wizened self that reminds us that there needn’t always be a tragedy for everything to fall to pieces. Sometimes, the hardest emotions are the simplest ones.