Review: “Navel Gazing” in ‘The Lost Daughter’
“Children are a crushing responsibility…”
As adaptation of the eponymous novel by Elena Ferrante, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, is a searing depiction of the complexity of motherhood. Suffused with subtle yet unrelenting tension, Gyllenhaal astutely translates to screen the quality of Ferrante’s prose that renders and dissects the imperfection of human relationships with an uncomfortable relativity.
In the film, a seemingly idyllic Greek island becomes the setting for decay and ruin as Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman), a terse university professor on holiday, becomes obsessed with an unsettled young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), and her child, Elena. When Elena goes missing, Leda helps find her, but she also steals the child’s doll for her own twisted game that soon spirals out of control. Cut into the film are a series of flashbacks where we see a younger version of Leda (played by Jessie Buckley) struggling with her own young daughters with whom she repeatedly loses her temper and eventually abandons for a period of time.
In one particularly visceral scene, the young Leda gifts one of her daughters her childhood doll–much like the one she then steals from Elena–and after being defaced with the child’s scribbles, the ruined doll is snatched away and thrown out of a window where it violently smashes on the street below. Moments like these are expertly punctuated throughout the film, and whilst almost unbearable to watch, they become pertinent symbols of difficult parental-filial relationships.
The film epitomizes the phenomenon of ‘navel-gazing.’ It is, at its core, an exploration of what it means to be a mother; to be a daughter; to survive or replicate the toxic relationships of your past. The ‘navel orange’ literally becomes a recurring symbol of motherhood, with the peeling and unravelling of an orange figuring a connection between Leda and her daughters. The orange peel–which becomes an imaginary snake–connects Leda to her children yet it arguably serves as a metaphor for how she feels constricted in her role as a mother. Close camera angles heighten a sense of the unveiling and bearing of an innermost self and the film feels both extremely personal yet profoundly universal.
Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley are equally formidable in their joint portrayal of Leda, who retains sympathy despite her questionable actions. Dakota Johnson, too, is oh-so-good at playing the darkly intelligent and troubled holiday-maker who gets embroiled in Leda’s psychological game. In fact, Johnson isn’t worlds away in this film from her role as ‘Pen’ in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2016), which similarly fits into the ‘holiday-gone-wrong’ genre.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ability to craft cinematic tension is nothing short of a masterclass. As a Ferrante fan, I was apprehensive to see how the work would be handled, but I walked away in awe of how well adapted this film was. Sophisticated, impactful, and gripping– The Lost Daughter comes as both a superb debut and a perfect film for starting off your year.
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