A review of the triple Academy Award nominated film “The Lost Daughter”
This psychological drama is based on a novel by a woman (the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante); it is both written and directed by a woman (the debut role for actor Maggie Gyllenhaal); and the three leading roles are taken by women (Olivia Coleman, Jessie Buckley and Dakota Johnson). It deals with an incredibly sensitive subject: the notion that parenting does not come naturally to everyone, even a woman. And there is a suggestion that how we parent is shaped by how we ourselves were parented.
The central character is Leda, a middle-aged literature professor on a working holiday on a Greek island, who is played by Coleman in the present and by Buckley in flash-backs, both of whom give wonderful performances of a woman in anguish. I think this would be classified as an art house film and key features of this style of moviemaking are slowness and opacity. So the pace is languid, which seems to suit the sea-side setting, and, while it is clear that Leda is damaged, we never learn why this is the case.
A seminal incident in the film is the loss of a child (hence the title) and her doll and I cannot help recalling that the final work in Ferrante’s four-part collection of Neapolitan novels is entitled “The Story Of The Lost Child” and that the beginning and the end of the quartet’s text involves respectively the losing and returning of two dolls.