Obscure, dark, murky. These are the words that more fittingly translate from the title of Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel La Figlia Oscura. In translation, it has become The Lost Daughter, and in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s own translation of the text to the screen, it has become an indelible and rare commentary on the imposition of being a parent. Particularly a mother, so often expected to be the more “nurturing” and “genteel” of the two parental roles. The protagonist (or anti-heroine, to some), named Leda Caruso (played by the inimitable Olivia Colman), in The Lost Daughter willfully decides not to accept that for herself, as we learn over the course of her vacation in Kyopeli (a fictional island meant to be set on the Ionian coast of Greece).
Upon arriving in the quaint town, Leda is greeted by the caretaker of the building, Lyle (Ed Harris, still alive and kickin’), who seems a little too over-eager and invasive for her independent tastes. Such is the tradeoff of enjoying a “rustic” vacation. And although the holiday feels idyllic and liberating at first, the quiet and serenity is interrupted one day while she’s on the beach enjoying an ice cream and a sudden barrage of people—mainly families—infect her once-private space (proving, yet again, the old adage that “hell is other people”). Because Gyllenhaal—in a stunning writing and directorial debut—likely didn’t want to pull a House of Gucci maneuver by having a barrage of offensive Italian accents, she alters the origins of this family from Neapolitan as it is in the book to being from Queens. But even a large Queensian family with Greek origins has the tendency to fulfill the “it takes a village” philosophy as Leda notes in the book, when the family is still Neapolitan, “It didn’t seem to me that [Nina] had a husband or someone who was obviously the father of the child. I noted instead that all the members of the family took affectionate care of her and the child.”
Dakota Johnson as Nina is at home in a role set on an exotic island (see also: A Bigger Splash), where drama and intrigue never fail to flourish. Likely because of how claustrophobic the milieu can turn after one gets over the illusion of it being “picturesque” as opposed to prison-like (see also: Alcatraz).
At the very beginning of The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal re-structures the narrative so that we’re aware from the outset that Leda has some kind of “condition.” Some nebulous malady seemingly driven by anxiety that prompts her into bouts of faintness (of course, the reason she falls in the first frame only becomes apparent to the audience at the very end of the film). Perhaps the Leda of Elena Ferrante’s imagination describes her condition—unclear even to her—best when she says, “The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.”
Where the Leda in the movie leaves her daughters, Bianca and Martha (Marta in the novel), early in their youth, the Leda in the book waits longer, until her “duty” is finally done, and they’ve grown up. An “end” she gives description to with, “I felt miraculously unfettered, as if a difficult job, finally brought to completion, no longer weighed me down.” Because even though they say parenting is a lifelong sentence, for someone like Leda, she’s the first to ditch any further responsibility once the age of eighteen is reached.
The poignant symbolism of the fruit in the bowl of Leda’s rented apartment is not lost on the viewer (and this is something that appears sooner in the book). The fact that Leda finds herself among rotten fruit is a testament not only to her “non-nurturing” aura, but also how the fruit is a subtle reminder of the ways she failed her own (loin) “fruit.” As Leda recounts the moment in the novel, “I was hungry and went back to the tray of fruit. I discovered that under the beautiful show figs, [the] pears, prunes, peaches [and] grapes were overripe or rotten. I took a knife and cut off the large black areas, but the smell disgusted me, the taste, and I threw almost all of it in the garbage.” Just as she essentially threw her own children into the garbage. The fruit, too, abets the constant memory of how her daughters loved it when she peeled an orange without ever breaking the exterior, turning it instead into a coiling “snake,” hence the chant, “Don’t let it break, peel it like a snake.” The layered meaning of not letting “it” break also referring to the implied bond between mother and daughter. And then there is the emblematic meaning of a snake itself, which Leda herself is meant to represent as a result of her betrayal and the sting she leaves each of her daughters with as a result of abandoning them.
Gyllenhaal doesn’t stay hemmed in by the chronology of the book, at times interweaving “moments” from it where she sees fit. For instance, where the cicada appears to Leda almost at the very outset of the book, it shows up later in the movie, after plenty of tension and anxiety have already built up within her. In novel format, the cicada is wielded more succinctly as part of the unjust expectations that come with being a woman, with Leda recounting, “I turned on the light. On the bright-white material of the pillowcase was an insect, three or four centimeters long, like a giant fly. It was dark brown, and motionless, with membranous wings. “I said to myself: it’s a cicada, maybe its abdomen burst on my pillow. I touched it with the hem of my bathrobe, it moved and became immediately quiet. Male, female. The stomach of the females doesn’t have elastic membranes, it doesn’t sing, it’s mute. I felt disgust… I cautiously picked up the pillow, went to one of the windows and tossed the insect out. That was how my vacation began.”
Other subtler moments in the book get turned into even more laden-with-meaning scenes, like when Leda remarks, “I don’t know why, I wrote those names in my notebook, Elena, Nani, Leni; maybe I liked the way Nina pronounced them.” And during the scene from the book wherein Leda watches Elena pour water all over her mother and her doll, the vexation comes across more overtly in print than it does through Colman’s acting, with Ferrante conveying, “I felt a growing repulsion… Of course, there I was at a distance, what did it matter to me, I could follow the game or ignore it, it was only a pastime.” And yet, something about the performative quality, especially on Nina’s part as she entertains the child’s fantasy, annoys Leda to no end. She hates the presumption that a mother must constantly seem into it, even when that’s the last thing she is. In this sense, motherhood is like a form of geishahood, where the woman is expected to consistently entertain with a smile and an air of obsequiousness for her accursed children.
As for a “reason” behind why Leda might be so “callous” (read: irritated that she has to become brain-dead to take care of them) toward her children, more insight about her own childhood background is given in the book, when she recalls things like, “Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote. I remember the dialect on my own mother’s lips when she lost that gentle cadence and yelled at us, poisoned by her unhappiness. I can’t take you anymore. I can’t take any more.” It was a feeling Leda could only later understand, in addition to the dream her mother openly shared of leaving them behind. A dream that would become evidently something Leda would have the nerve to fulfill. “A frayed nerve…just touched, and the pain scrapes away all self-control.” For Leda, what helps erode some of that self-control in her twenties is a professor who takes a liking to her work (additional code for: her body) on a Yeats translation. Because this is a Maggie Gyllenhaal movie, she naturally opted to give the part of Professor Hardy to her husband, Peter Sarsgaard.
Another man who catches her eye is the helpful and handsome attendant at the beach. In the book, the attendant is named Gino, who becomes a Dubliner named Will (Paul Mescal) in the movie. Upon first seeing Gino in the book, Leda all at once comprehends how much of herself she’s lost over the years to the ingrained opinions and personalities of her daughters. Accordingly, she admits, “I realized long ago that I’ve held onto little of myself and everything of them. Even now, I was looking at Gino through the filter of Bianca’s experiences, of Marta’s, according to the tastes and passions I imagine as theirs.”
Having her oldest daughter at the age of twenty-three, Leda sacrificed what was left of her youth without realizing how much of her identity she would have to erase before she herself was even fully formed. It is only now, having shed the burden of “worrying” about them (or at least feigning to worry) that she can truly experience something like liberty. Various scenes of her driving elicit the notion of freedom, escape—running away even. During one particular jaunt, she sings along to the Talking Heads’ “People Like Us,” namely the lyrics, “People like us/(Who will answer the telephone)/People like us/(Growing big as a house)/People like us/(Gonna make it because)/We don’t want freedom.” As a song about wanting someone to love in lieu of true freedom, it undercuttingly gets to the core of the notion that mothers are the ones expected to love unconditionally, whereas they do not get the same luxury in return, least of all from their own husbands, who, so often, even to this day, go out for “a pack of cigarettes” (so to speak) and never come back. Which is why the mother being the one to leave still comes across as so much more controversial. This is supposed to be the male privilege. To come and go, to skitter away forever.
The comings and goings of Nina’s own baby daddy, Toni (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), are as much of an indication of that—as well as a mirror of the type of husband Leda was dealing with as well. Joe (Jack Farthing) is a scholar as well, and yet he inherently feels his work deserves to take precedence over Leda’s because it’s still ingrained in so many men to believe that the woman should be the primary caretaker—and that her own intellectual needs and pursuits are irrelevant once a spawn comes along.
The Lost Daughter, more than any other narrative (except maybe Mommie Dearest) makes it clear that there is little empathy for “the mother.” A woman who might have more to give, to say and to do than the confines of what that title infers. Leda is just such a woman—a great mind with a fierce intellect that is constantly being interrupted by the burden of motherhood. And yes, that’s what motherhood is, regardless of the masses wanting to market it as “the most beautiful thing in the world.” Naturally, some might ask: well, then, why did she have children to begin with? Likely because it remains the cliché expectation of all women to have them, with men still given the more likely freedom of an “out” from full-fledged responsibility. Whether that means physically leaving or “mere” emotional detachment is up to the father in question. But because the mother is expected to suppress any such temptations due to the “gift” of her role, she’s the more likely parent to be saddled with raising her kids—even when a father does stick around. Leda is a rare depiction of how many women actually view their irrevocable “bit part” (always looming in the background to the larger-than-life figures that are their children), but feel too stifled and guilty to actually express it.
At long last, The Lost Daughter (almost a contraception PSA) offers some brutal insight into why motherhood isn’t the “golly gee whiz, my purpose is totally fulfilled!” phenomenon that patriarchy and advertising has been conditioning women to believe in for centuries.
