Novelist Elena Ferrante is perhaps best known for her Neapolitan novels. HBO’s ongoing adaptation of those works, My Brilliant Friend, is filled with a quiet menace that permeates all of her work. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, for which she also wrote the script, translates that same feeling to the screen.
Set in modern day rather than mid-century, it follows Leda (Olivia Colman) on a solo beach vacation in Greece. Her idyllic silence is broken by a raucous family from Queens that includes Nina (Dakota Johnson), an alluring young mother who reminds Leda of her younger self. As she watches Nina struggle with the demands of motherhood, Leda (played in flashbacks by Jessie Buckley) is plagued by memories of her past.
While the threats the characters face in My Brilliant Friend are largely external, here, they’re internal. From the way Leda’s face falls when Nina and her family first arrive or her refusal to move to a different part of the beach when they ask, we half expect her to turn dangerous. But Ferrante’s most profound horrors are always psychological and Leda’s interactions with Nina and her own past are really tools to put her into a state of emotional crisis.
Gyllenhaal herself is a thoughtful and complex actress. So, it’s unsurprising that she pulls and captures such layered performances from her core trio of actresses. Johnson has played a mysterious and potentially dangerous honeypot before in Luca Guadignino’s A Bigger Splash, but Leda seems to desire Nina just as much as she sees her younger self in her. With lingering, worshipful close-up shots of Johnson’s body and frequent moments where Nina meets Leda’s gaze (and therefore the audience’s) with equal fascination, Gyllenhaal conveys both Nina and Johnson’s inescapable allure.
Buckley and Colman’s versions of Leda are far more forthcoming with the audience, yet they convey just as much in silence as they do in speech. We see a through line between Buckley’s Leda enjoying a work trip away from her family and a scene of Colman’s Leda lounging on the beach just as much as we do in the hard sets of their jaws when young Leda tries to work despite her daughters’ screaming versus when older Leda’s silence is broken by Nina’s family. Though they play the same character at different stages of her life, Buckley’s Leda is actively in the process of blowing up her oppressive family situation while Colman’s Leda is reflecting on and examining the repercussions of those choices years later.
Traditionally, those reflections would lead to an expression of regret. Hollywood film history is filled with women punished for rejecting patriarchal feminine roles—especially motherhood. But what makes Ferrante’s work so bracing is the way she rejects such easy resolutions. As Leda says at the beginning, “children are a crushing responsibility,” and while she spends the film reflecting on her choices, when Nina asks her if she regrets them, she responds with a self-assured, “no.” Though what happens in The Lost Daughter is relatively simple, it’s meaning is revolutionary.
Elena Ferrante writes about the quiet–and often secret–resentments of women. While Colman, Johnson and Buckley convey so much of their characters’ emotional states through simple glances or terse line deliveries, they also each hold something back. We learn so much about Leda’s relationship to motherhood in both time periods and yet she still feels unknowable in some fundamental way, filled with desires and disappointments she’ll keep to herself forever. Likewise, it’s never clear just how much Nina intuits about Leda and whether she likes her at all or she’s manipulating her in some subtle way.
However, despite how little these characters allow us and others to truly understand them, one thing is certain: these are unruly women. By rejecting heteronormative ideas of motherhood as a noble and purely joyous Nina and Leda dare viewers to hate them. It is a profound statement of just how successful Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film is that it seems unfathomable to do anything but sympathize with them.
