The Lost Daughter

 The Lost Daughter is an estimable drama based on a book of the same title by the mysterious Elena Ferrante.  (How many books has this person -- or persons -- written?  It seems that about every week there is a new Netflix adaptation of one of her works.) The movie is well-acted and has a highly literate script but it doesn't work -- in fact, the film is a lugubrious slog.  It's hard to figure out exactly what is wrong with this movie -- or, indeed, if there's anything wrong at all.  The picture is so uncompromising that it's not really entertainment -- the viewer cringes and mourns but there's no pleasure to be had notwithstanding the top-notch cast and expensive production values.  Maggie Gyllenhaal directed the picture, not too skillfully I'm afraid.  My perspective on this film is a dissenting opinion -- a lot of critics have high regard for this picture.

Leda is on summer holiday, a "working vacation" to a Greek island.  She is 48 and alone, a highly regarded translator -- English into Italian.  She plans to work on an Italian edition of Yeats and the Irish writer's "Leda and the Swan" is a touchstone for the picture, the subject of frequent allusions.  Leda (Olivia Coleman) has the beach to herself at first -- she lazes in the warm sea-water, flirts with Lyle (Ed Harris), a local handy-man and factotum for the other more disreputable guests at the resort, and works on the beach.  She seems a bit disoriented, perhaps, suffering from some insidious disease -- she doesn't know enough to keep out of the sun; the hunky cabana boy, Will, has to move her sun-shade to keep her from getting too badly sunburned.  After a few days involving some disconcerting discoveries -- the nice fresh fruit display in her rooms is all rotted on its underside and a gigantic cicada ends up sharing a pillow with her -- things take a turn for the worse when a large American family, apparently with Greek connections, shows up to share the beach with her.  These people are noisy, vulgar, foul-mouthed, rude and combative.  Lyle warns her that they are "bad people", apparently, American gangsters of the old school from New Jersey or Philadelphia.  (Every year they come to the Greek island to conduct some shady business while the family with its showy gangster molls sunbathes on the beach -- they rent a large conspicuous pink villa.)  Leda despises the family and, even, defies them when they ask her to move somewhere else on the beach.  One of the women, Callisto, admires her nerve and tries to make peace with the bristly, equally rude if more outwardly polite, Leda.  When asked where she lives, Leda always says "Cambridge, it's near Boston", apparently, unwilling to admit that she, apparently, teaches at Harvard -- although, in a finely tuned bit of observation, Leda makes sure that everyone knows her pedigree, after all, what does "Cambridge near Boston" mean otherwise?  (Perhaps, she has to explain the location of her Cambridge since she speaks with a British accent -- "her people" as the gangster women would say, come from Leeds in the U.K. )  Leda observes a bratty little girl among the gangsters, someone named Elena.  This child induces in Leda a series of flashbacks that ultimately come to dominate the film's second half.  Through these flashbacks, we see the young Leda, played brilliantly by the Irish actress Jessie Buckley.  Young Leda is a mother struggling to succeed in the Acadame with two little girls, Bianca and Martha.  The girls are extremely spoiled and nasty -- they punch their mother when she is trying to nap, comb her hair roughly, and are constantly demanding her attention.  (All of the children in this film are portrayed in refreshingly realistic terms -- they are all monsters from the Id, incredibly needy and vicious when their pressing desires are thwarted.  This observation doesn't apply only to the little kids -- everyone in this movie, including Leda, is selfish, narcissistic, and vehemently demanding.  It's rare to find a film in which every single character is not just annoying, but, in fact, deplorable.)  As we come to learn, Leda, constantly irritated by her daughters' importuning, embarked on an extra-marital affair, left her handsome but indolent post-doctoral degree husband, and, then, in  turn was abandoned by her lover, a bearded lit-crit "god" as she calls him.  The lover, we discover, was put-off by Leda's apparent lack of interest in her children -- she admits that she despises talking to them by telephone, something that appalls her manipulative, if sentimental, boyfriend.  As is the custom with pictures about "unnatural mothers," The Lost Daughter, although ostensibly a feminist picture, makes poor Leda pay a high price for her deficits in maternal feeling.  This may be one reason that I dislike the picture -- clearly, the movie pays lip-service to the notion that it's perfectly valid for a brainy career woman to desire that she not be saddled with whining, bratty children (these kids even interrupt their poor mom while she trying to masturbate), but, nonetheless, the movie features a plot in which Leda punished for her neglect, even to the point of being stabbed in the womb and, then, bleeding to death on a Greek beach -- so much for the feminist notion that women should have the right to choose to what degree they will be good role models as mothers.  Leda mourns the fact that she has neglected her own daughters and begins to project her own anxieties and guilt about motherhood on the gangster family, particularly a young mother named Nina, a protypical, gorgeous Jersey girl, with a daughter, Elena.  When Elena goes missing on the beach, Leda finds her hiding in the woods -- apparently attempting to boss around her mother through this  manipulative stratagem.  Leda returns the child to the gruesome bosom of her gangster family, but, for reasons that are completely opaque, keeps the little girl's much-beloved doll and, indeed, hides it in her villa.  The child, Elena, is so viciously spoiled that she, then, torments her mother by refusing to sleep without the doll.  The gangsters search high and low for the doll but can't find it -- this is because Leda has secreted the nasty toy in her rooms, although now and then, she yanks it out of the cupboard to cradle it in her arms and between her maternal breasts.  Nina's criminal husband is on the mainland transacting some kind of shady business.  Nina, who is angry at her loutish husband, embarks on an affair with Will, the handsome Irish cabana boy.  The affair is witnessed by Leda and Nina's embraces with Will trigger in Leda another series of explicit flashbacks about the collapse of her marriage (her husband couldn't maintain an erection long enough to satisfy her), her affair with the lit-crit god (she meets him at a conference called Translation and the Art of Failure), and, then, some painful recollections of her thwarted relationship with her own little monsters, Bianca and Martha, and her lover's dismay at her disinterest in her children.  There a number of scenes in which the gangsters threaten Leda or interfere with her quiet enjoyment of the island's amenities -- for instance, the gangster boys, of whom there are about a half-dozen, bust into a showing of a movie at the island's cinema (Titania -- the movie abounds in classical references) and provoke a scene with Leda.  Ed Harris who cooks an octopus for Leda tries to spark up a relationship with her -- but she's too weird by this time, and too lost in memories of her misbegotten relationship with her ex-husband and her daughters.  (Leda keeps stumbling, falling, drifting pale-faced into near faints -- in one strange scene, she pauses on the sidewalk and squats; it looks like she's suddenly succumbed to a bout of severe diarrhea.)  Leda shows the unfaithful Nina how to keep her hat on using a long, vicious-looking hat pin.  The hat pin, of course, is like Chekhov's gun -- it's poised to go off in the last act.  Nina asks Leda to lend her villa as location for trysts with Will.  For some unknown reason, Leda confesses to Nina that she has hidden Elena's doll and surrenders it to the enraged young mother.  "I'm an unnatural mother," Leda says, as if this explains anything (it doesn't).  Nina, then, stabs poor Leda right in the uterus with the eight-inch long hat pin.  Leda drives away, crashes her car, and, then, staggers onto the beach.  She survives the night and, although seemingly bleeding to death, talks to her daughter Bianca, who is now 25, about peeling an orange in one long spiral slice "like a snake."

Everything is impeccably acted although the movie is shot in a very irritating and counter-productive style.  Gyllenhaal has her camera poised about 6 inches from her characters who are often out of focus and shot from vantages that conceal or obscure what they are doing -- the purpose for this idiosyncratic style is clear enough:  we are shown that Leda is "too close" to her own sorrow and grief to be able to understand it; she's locked into herself to the extent that she can't reliably perceive herself and her own motives.  Olivia Coleman is fantastic in an unrewarding role -- she's completely rebarbative, angry, and spiteful, what we would call a raging "Karen" in our current parlance.  (This is the kind of freakishly uncompromising performance that wins women Oscar nominations, if not, I think Oscars.)  If anything, Jessie Buckley, as the young Leda is even better -- she has a nasty smirk and always seems about on the verge of murdering her bratty kids, who, I think, richly deserve this fate.  The film has some showy Gothic flourishes -- at one point, a worm comes out of the nose of the ugly little doll that Leda has stolen from Elena.  And, in fact, I kept hoping that the doll would prove to be more than purely symbolic (I guess it's supposed to represent Leda's thwarted maternal instincts) -- that is, that the doll would be full of cocaine or something on that order.  (No such luck.)  The film's deep structure is full of the doom and gloom of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice:  an aging academic vacations in the Mediterranean, confronts her secret desires and sorrows, and ends up enmeshed in a relationship (that isn't really a relationship but more an obsession) that can only end in death.  This sort of allusion is reasonable in context:  after all, Leda is a professor of comparative literature.  The film is a sort of pious fraud -- it purports to be feminist, but, in fact, has a plot arc with which D. W. Griffith or for that matter his female contemporary, Lois Weber, would have been completely comfortable:  a brilliant, talented woman ruthlessly abandons her children to pursue a doomed love affair and pays a terrible price for her sins.  It's a plot that most men might even endorse -- and, indeed, there's plenty of current surmise that Elena Ferrante, the other of the source novel, is, indeed, a man.