Maggie Gyllenhaal, one of the best living American actors, makes her directorial debut with “The Lost Daughter” (2021), which is an adaptation of a novel with the same name by pseudonym Elena Ferrante. It follows a professor, Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman) alone on a working vacation in Kypseli, Greece. As a Greek American family with centuries long roots in the area descends on the area and disrupts her quiet pleasure, she gets drawn into their drama, and it triggers memories as she empathizes with one young mother in the family.
“The Lost Daughter” is a slow burn of a film, which takes time to find its footing, but once it does, it is so unexpected and rewarding those nonjudgmental viewers or those who are unbothered with ambiguous storylines will return for repeat viewing. It starts melodramatically and employs my least favorite narrative device by revealing a part of the ending. A viewer unfamiliar with the novel will allow the title to influence them and jump to more dramatic conclusions than the actual onscreen events, but this film is not a Lifetime movie or a mystery.
“The Lost Daughter” grounds its drama in the quotidian. Leda is a sensuous woman approaching middle age reveling in her environment and her own company. On first impression, she is a solitary woman confident and willing to stand her ground. Leda is undiplomatic, does not know how to act conventionally and knows what she wants, but her actions do not disturb her until as she is forced to interact with the people in her environment. People misjudge her as younger than she is perhaps because her actions are considered inappropriate since she is bad at reading and reacting to social situations. The film shows her losing more composure by showing her acting on impulse, fleeing uncomfortable situations and having involuntary physical reactions. Her initial pleasure in the environment gives way to revulsion as nature becomes hostile, rotting, or invasive.
As she becomes erratic, “The Lost Daughter” shows more flashbacks to show us which memories are being triggered to clear up why she is so troubled. The dramatic narrative would feel familiar to a sci fi fan—that a person can exist in multiple time periods at the same time. Gyllenhaal suggests that the opening scene/denouement has triggered a physical phenomenon in Leda, which causes unconsciousness over time and space. There is a brief flash to the denouement when Leda is on the couch with another character. She is not only regressing to the nadir of her life when she had no physical or psychological autonomy and lost the version of herself that she loved-the scholar and sensuous woman. She is also feeling a reverberation from the future that is stronger depending on how proximate she is to that moment. It feels very “La Jetee” (1962).
“The Lost Daughter” flashbacks are more understandable to the ordinary viewer than present Leda’s life. The younger Leda (Jersie Buckley) was a woman who endures physical indignities and expects nothing. Then we see flashes of her reawakening-a woman who embraces romantic languages, interacts with other adults as adults and is appreciated for her best self, as a thinker and a sexual being. She does not beg for peace or favors. She is beckoned and takes it without concern for being a proper woman.
My favorite part of “The Lost Daughter” is how her reunion with herself is not associated with a man or a love interest though a man plays a part, Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard, Gyllenhaal’s real life husband, whom she clearly finds sexy in real life based on the way that she films him) and that her descent into madness is associated with traditional roles. By being “unnatural,” she becomes better at her traditional role in moderation.
The older Leda is not just triggered by the family. There is a relentless campaign against her boundaries, and she gets placed in a mindset to be afraid of nature and her environment, which heightens her paranoia and makes her an unreliable narrator. She wants the window up, but it is closed, and the air conditioning is turned on. She is having a nice time in the sun, and she is offered an umbrella. She experiences hostility at a public beach, a movie theater and a dance party. There are rumors about dangerous people. She feels followed, and people are blocking her car. People come up to her uninvited at dinner, at her rental, in the street. Even if this hostility has nothing to do with her, and she is delusional or reading everything through a distorted filter, the nice and mean crossing of her boundaries physically put her in the same mindset of having children and not having the right to boundaries.
“The Lost Daughter” is superb for what is left unsaid or at the margins. Every time that she talks about her mother, viewers should pay attention because the film never gives us Leda’s backstory, but her childhood clearly affected her as an adult. There is no prose dump, but that doll and Leda’s attachment to it at every point of her life symbolizes why she categorizes her desires as “selfish.” Victims of trauma often get frozen at the age that they were when it occurred, or those feelings do not emerge until the person has a child who reaches the same age that they were when the trauma occurred. It is painful to watch her incapable of rising above her limits and see the pain that it causes her family. She refuses to ignore her needs to not kiss and make it better. She does not want to be touched or bothered, which is understandable, but simultaneously we see that she is creating trauma in others.
“The Lost Daughter” is one of the best films in 2021 because it shows us a story of an imperfect, often annoying and reckless protagonist, but makes viewers get invested in her story even when she commits unlikable acts. It has great acting, composition and dissonant pairing of image and sound to create disorientation. As someone who believes that I have an auditory processing disorder, seeing an image then experiencing a delay in hearing, registering and comprehending what someone, I love when this phenomenon is cinematically rendered. It usually happens when Leda is outdoors and speaking to a woman or more than one woman. I do not believe that it happens when she talks to men. She is more invested in her exchanges with women because of what it triggers in her. I also loved how Leda picked up and homed in on topics that people were uncomfortable with, not to cause discomfort, but to elicit an honest exchange. She lived a countercultural life, and it interests her. When she was a young wife and mother and as a divorced professor, she is interested in stories of people who are unnatural and is an evangelist of embracing that side of her life.
“The Lost Daughter” does not spoon feed us explanations, is often abstract and impressionist and expects its audience to take the journey without concern that it will lose people along the way. What a great time to be alive and witness the birth of our best actors becoming superb directors.