Most know Elena Ferrante as the pseudonymous Italian author of a quadrology of novels that dials in on the complexities of female friendship, beginning with My Brilliant Friend. But even before her now-internationally-famous Neapolitan novels, Ferrante was publishing piercing work in Italy that was being translated to English by former New Yorker copy chief Ann Goldstein and published to fervent Anglophone audiences. One of those novels, The Lost Daughter, focuses on Leda Caruso, a middle-aged divorcée English professor who vacations in Florence without her two beloved daughters. After encountering a struggling young mother, she is catapulted into reflection about the agonies of motherhood. Then things get weird.
Helming a free and twisty adaptation of the the novel is Maggie Gyllenhaal, a fiercely committed American actress who has given memorable performances in Secretary and Sherrybaby, and more recently The Kindergarten Teacher, the miniseries The Honourable Woman, and the television series The Deuce (which she also co-produced). In The Lost Daughter, premiering at Venice Film Festival September 3 with a limited theatrical release December 17 and a Netflix streaming release December 31, Gyllenhaal skillfully alters the backgrounds, location, and circumstances of Ferrante’s characters in order to clear the ground to tell her own version of the story.
Leda, played by a perfectly pitched Olivia Colman, is a Cambridge, Mass-dwelling academic—a very Harvard way of saying a Harvard professor—originally from Leeds, UK, who takes her holiday in Greece. There, she encounters an alluring young American mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson, in jet black long hair and flashy bathing suits) and becomes transfixed.
There are a series of other interlopers in the film as well: Succession’s Dagmara Domińczyk plays Nina’s pregnant sister-in-law, who confronts Leda when the former’s large, unruly family descends on the beach. This early face-off is indicative of the film’s ensuing rhythms–the women spar, then they make up, then they spar again. Gyllenhaal thrives in the unsaid; we’re not quite sure what’s going on between them,, but we can guess. Colman plays Leda as both fascinating and disturbing, tender and cruel. We are both worried for her and exasperated with her—she seems relieved to be on her own, yet terrified of the implications.
Wild Rose and I’m Thinking of Ending Things breakout Jessie Buckley is unsurprisingly excellent in flashback sequences as young Leda, a frustrated mother trying to nurture a promising career as a translator of English to Italian, focusing on the work of poet W.H. Auden, a Brit who, like Leda, eventually took off for America. Her passion for her work is severely challenged by her responsibility to her two daughters, Bianca and Martha. But rather than dutifully accepting that tradeoff, she fights it—urging her mostly absent husband to take on more of the weight and enthusiastically hiring a babysitter when she receives an invitation to translate for an Italian scholar at a conference. At the conference, a worshipped academic remarks in his speech that “Leda Caruso is inside of Auden’s secret mythology”—a clue to the rest of the film’s unfolding. Later, Leda and this professor, played by Gyllenhaal’s husband, actor Peter Sarsgaard, lustfully quote“Caliban’s last sigh,” part of Auden’s 1944 book-length poem, The Sea and the Mirror. Fittingly, it’s a work that challenges Shakespeare’s The Tempest in insisting that the imaginative and bestial—or the reproductive and destructive—are allied, not opposed.
To this end, Gyllenhaal devises a visual language that’s as capricious as it is arresting. She knows exactly what she wants to capture and how, and we can feel it in the pacing and framing. Some scenes feel languid, even eerie in their slow movement, like when Leda’s bed-and-breakfast host (a weathered and mischievous Ed Harris) insists on spending the day with her. Others, especially the flashbacks to Leda’s young motherhood, are dizzyingly quick, sharp, and intense.
The moods and tones gradually merge, yet never become predictable–as whenNormal People’s Paul Mescal shows up as Will, an attractive young Irish worker at the beach who charms and is charmed by Leda. In their scenes together, we feel Leda’s spark, a lust for vitality that sets her at odds with the image that’s been thrust upon her as a middle-aged mother. People keep remarking to Leda that she looks much younger than she is; she couldn’t possibly be a mother of two women in their twenties! Her crisp shirts, fashionable sunglasses, tasteful bathing suits, smooth skin—the implication is, shouldn’t she be looking more beleaguered by now?
The weathering, as it were, is internal. Yet the film develops strategies to draw those emotions outward. Ferrante’s source material is undeniably strong—the novel skillfully unveils myriad disturbances and a major twist that I won’t reveal here. But Gyllenhaal, with Ferrante’s blessing, teases out those plot points into her own exciting emotional terrain. A director cannot transcribe a writer’s style onto screen—it’s up to them to do the work of adaptation, which is to say, to make something else entirely. With The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal easily proves her talent and instinct as a director by unflinchingly infusing a great story with her own ideas and images‚ and assembling an unbeatable cast and crew (including Happy as Lazzaro and Never Rarely Sometimes Always cinematographer Hélène Louvart) to bring it home.
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