At first, it is confusing what is happening to Leda. The woman carrying the Yeatsian name is working as a professor and translator, and she is on a swift holiday to Greece where she hopes to get some rest under the sun. Unfortunately, almost to the moment of her arriving at the seaside town, strange things start to take place. And the oddity seems to revolve around Leda. Does this strangeness come from Leda herself, or has the world been this strange all the time? Why does she react to everything so intensely? What’s with her being so paranoid and uncomfortable? Is there anything wrong with her? The Lost Daughter is the adaptation of a novel of the same name written by Elena Farrante in 2006. It is also Maggie Gyllenhaal’s debut as a director, and it was such a debut. Agonizing, unexpected, painful and aggressive, this movie is definitely not for children.
One of the most exceptional things about this movie is Gyllenhaal’s stubbornness about not explaining Leda’s mystery.
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What reasons lie behind Leda’s actions? The backstory is clear, but there was no complete answer. Leda says in Ferrante’s book that “The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.” It should be noted that she uses the word “can’t”, not “don’t”. Leda is confused about why she does what she does.
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She gets obsessed. She gets compulsive. She conflicts with herself. The Lost Daughter goes through tough stories, and with Gyllenhaal’s focus on her lead actress who plays the first-person of the book, audiences can expect an uncomfortable and even scary experience. There is this uneasy feeling that Leda may not be a very dependable narrator.
Leda (Olivia Colman) enjoys her holiday on the beach, reading, swimming and trying to fall asleep at night despite the sweeping light from the nearby lighthouse. Though Lyle the caretaker (Ed Harris) is nice and supportive, Leda’s reactions still feel off. Yes, she is polite, but it seems that she can’t handle socialization. She joins the conversation, but not attached to it. After a few days, an extremely loud family arrives. They keep on chatting noisily, splashing water and getting blankets and chairs and food ready. Leda can’t focus, so she drops her reading and watches them, trying to figure out each of them. Leda pays attention to a particular young woman in a bikini (Dakota Johnson) who is playing with her little girl. The way Leda concentrates on the mother and daughter is somehow too intense. Her eyes roll after them. A pregnant lady named Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk) asks for Leda’s seat as the whole family wants to be together. Leda says no. Callie is shocked. The whole family gives Leda the stink eye for the rest of the day, forcing Leda to leave the beach. She returns the next day, though.
Mixed with these bizarre and tense present-day scenes are those from Leda’s life twenty years earlier. But these scenes are no flashbacks. Instead, they run parallelly with the present, not only to create confusion with lots of sensations and parallels, but also function to fill in Leda’s story. Younger Leda (Jessie Buckley, who just looks like the younger Colman) is a confused, upset and overwhelmed girl who is trying to keep her career and parenting her two small clingy daughters in harmony. A famous celebrity scholar (Peter Sarsgaard) is interested in Leda’s work, which takes a burden off the woman’s shoulder. She longs for freedom, and she’s so fed up with all of her responsibilities.
In the meantime, Leda becomes friends with a young woman in a bikini named Nina. Leda takes the role of a mother, but something is not right about the whole thing. Her interest is a bit too harsh. Nina, played by Johnson, is mixed between languorous pleasure and strained desperation. Nina is “acting” for a good cause. Callie, Nina’s sister-in-law, is very observant.
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She is not a person to mess with.
At one point of the book, Leda states that “The unspoken says more than the spoken.” This is absolutely true for most parts of the movie, but not with such an untrustworthy narrator like Leda. She is so self-centered that with each of her interactions, Leda puts threat, aspiration, insecurity and all the unsettled problems on the other person. Her self-consuming characteristic causes her to constantly misconceive the “unspoken”.
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Other people’s gestures, body language and pause are all misunderstood in her mind. She feels threatened even where there can hardly be any. She misunderstands the young guy at the beach club. She “can’t understand.” Leda is “acting” just as much as Nina. At the end, we do know what Leda did back then, but we still can’t fully get her decisions – one particularly – on this vacation of destiny.
Many movies are not accepted by audiences for their characters not being “relatable.” Of course, characters that can reflect viewers’ experience are appreciable. However, there are also many great characters in literature that are not so bright, they show us things we want to overlook, show us the dark, nasty parts of humanity where we make mistakes. These things exist as well, and they are just as true, if not even more true, than what we call “relatable.” The Lost Daughter allows the ugly part to come to light and express itself, thus not having to switch back into safe territory.
Gyllenhaal is challenged to apprehend all of this twisting “unspoken” subtext. Lots of emotional chaos swirl around that beach, among all of those daughters, whether lost ones or otherwise.
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Gyllenhaal gives way to this chaos. She doesn’t try to ease it. She doesn’t chase clarity. Her rough and subjective approach to the movie resembles Leda’s point of view to the point it almost becomes claustrophobic. Leda is observant and anxious, she’s impulsive and careless at times. She keeps lying and pretending, and finds it increasingly impossible to keep her bizarre inner world secret, both from other people and from herself. This performance of Colman is among the best ones of the year.
The Lost Daughter is now available in select theaters and will arrive on Netflix on December 31.
