Un-Natural Mothers
Fear and loathing in Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter
Last night L and I watched the new adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel, The Lost Daughter. Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film had me enthralled from the beginning with its dark themes and imagery. I’ve never read Elena Ferrante (gasp, I know!), and I tried to head into the film relatively spoiler-free, but this newsletter will not be spoiler-free.
Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman, with acting as perfect as her cheekbones) is a professor of comparative literature vacationing in Greece and renting an apartment by the sea. She has two adult daughters, with whom she appears to have a strained relationship. While visiting the beach, she brushes up against another vacationing family, which includes young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her older sister-in-law, Callisto (Dagmara Domińczyk – Succession stans, unite). Leda quickly entwines herself in Nina’s life, seeking company for her maternal misery.
Leda herself is an observer, and for a large portion of the movie, Nina is only seen through Leda’s own lens: a beautiful, if slightly overwhelmed, young mother, too far away from Leda to be heard. As a director, Gyllenhaal is skillful in her framing of Nina, especially in these early scenes when we do not yet know her. In one moment, Gyllenhaal’s camera lingers on Nina as she lays on the beach, tan and stretched towards the sun. Her daughter Elena plays on and with her body, watching the water fall from her hands down her mother’s ribs. Yet when Leda gets to know Nina after a fright on the beach when Elena goes missing, Leda recognizes a familiar spark of sadness in Nina, prompting her to become entwined with the young woman, despite her fearful family.
As we learn over the course of Leda’s time in Greece and through flashbacks, Leda is a self-described “unnatural mother.” Raising her own young daughters, she contended with an equally ambitious academic husband, finding herself resentful of their needs as they encroached on her own career. We eventually learn that Leda left her daughters for three years in a time she describes as “amazing.” And while it may be true that she does not regret her actions, knowing herself as a “selfish person,” she does have unresolved guilt which manifests itself as intense vertigo anytime she discusses her children.
Leda’s reactions to the women around her are also revealing. In Nina, she sees a spark of wildness begging to be set free. “He says my breasts are the size of his hand,” Nina laughs about her controlling husband, but Leda stares blankly ahead. Who is this man, to suggest that her breasts were made to fit his hands? In Callisto, Nina’s older sister-in-law who has tried for years to have children, Leda sees a repulsive maternal desperation, and her passive aggressive barbs are meant to remind Callie of her role as a non-mother. Here too we see how exchanges of maternal tenderness between the women are always loaded, with a chance to turn sour. They have moments of reaching out to each other, of giving into their own nurturing instincts, even against their own better judgment. We see this in Callie reaching out to Leda with a cream for her wound (itself a symbol of Leda’s guilt) only to be insulted by Leda. Leda reaches out to pin back Nina’s hair, and the close, warm camera angle shows Nina in a brief moment of ecstasy at being held by a maternal figure. The symbol of this intimacy, the hairpin, is also what Nina uses to puncture Leda’s hope for their bond, by stabbing her with it in their final confrontation.
Leda’s relationship with her daughters does not bode any better. Early on, we see her give her older daughter Bianca her own childhood doll. When Bianca rejects the doll, young Leda (Jessie Buckley) in turn rejects Bianca and their maternal link by throwing it out the window, where it shatters onto the street. In an impulsive, violent act, she destroys both her own inner child and her bond with her daughter. The Lost Daughter, while not sympathetic to Leda, does share her view of motherhood as committing to a life of a thousand daily heartbreaks. In stealing Elena’s doll, Leda regains control over a traumatic inner wound by spreading it to others too. Yet in trying to demonstrate to herself that she is not remorseful, she spends all of her time dwelling. In every conversation, she discusses her daughters and their disappointment in her.
In a flashback, Leda’s husband invites two British hitchhikers in for dinner. The woman recognizes Leda’s namesake poem, by W. B. Yeats, and they have a loaded exchange which opens Leda’s mind to the possibility of leaving. We see, too, as her young daughters grow distrustful of her. Where she was once their primary caregiver, Leda decides to pursue her own ambition instead. A crucial scene in which an overwhelmed Leda is still the only parent present to show the babysitter where to find the emergency contact list and weekend meal prep highlights the unspoken division of labour in their household. She attends a conference where she meets a fellow scholar, Dr. Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard), who shares her passion for translation and praises her intellect.
“Your name,” he says, “is very provocative.”
“Yes, well, it always brings rape to mind.”
They become intimate and start an affair. Where her husband barely seems to understand her area of study, it is Hardy’s appreciation for her work that fills her with desire. Yet he too ultimately disappoints her, when he dismisses her comment about being an uncaring mother. He does not understand a crucial part of her. Lyle (Ed Harris), the apartment’s caretaker, does understand her. He too abandoned his children, though he carries his guilt more openly, which for a moment seems to frighten Leda.
Yet her memories of her children frequently show them retreating from her, distrustful of her maternal actions. She becomes a stranger in exchange for her own freedom. She became a husband, in a reversal reminiscent of Judy Brady’s 1971 short essay, I Want a Wife:
“I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother.
Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a recent divorce. He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife. He is obviously looking for another wife. As I thought about him while I was ironing one evening, it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would like to have a wife. Why do I want a wife?”
...
“I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife’s duties. But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies. And I want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.”
Leda’s connection to the doll, which represents her own discarded relationship with her daughters, is also her curse. She tries to salvage it, but it has become repulsive. Likewise, Nina rejects Leda’s offering of support, stabbing her with the hairpin. The ending was open to interpretation, as some viewers believed that Leda was mentally-ill and hallucinated crashing her car and bleeding out on the beach. However, this reading is founded by a belief that something is wrong with Nina, whereas I believe she is simply someone who realized too late what made her happy.
As she dies, she recalls teaching her daughters the meaning of “navel,” a word evocative of the umbilical word that once connected mother and child. She peels a navel orange and enjoys the simple pleasures of motherhood while her daughters call her on the phone. She is finally at peace with herself and her decisions.
You can watch The Lost Daughter on Netflix. Have you seen it? What did you think?
This week’s recommendations
Search Party’s fifth season premiered this month on HBO Max. It’s an incredible, fun, subversive show that hops across genres to examine the inner psyche of millennial narcissist Dory Sief. Alia Shawkat plays Dory, but Dory herself is a woman who has no stable sense of self; she is a new character every season, and by the fifth season, every episode. Besides being hilarious and clever, Search Party also gets prescient: this season has a not-so-subtle pandemic parallel that I won’t spoil. Shawkat has a great new interview in The New Yorker (“Alia Shawkat Is a Cult Classic”) where she discusses acting, painting, social media, Zoomers, and more. I loved her comment about how millennials are addicted to social media but hate themselves for it, while Gen Z “Zoomers” place their entire lives up for grabs on social media knowing that it’s an inescapable reality.
Kirsten Dunst’s Feminine Urges | The Mysterious Figure Stealing Books Before Their Release | Horror and Hormones, Grief and Gore, in “Yellowjackets” | Here’s scientific proof your brain was designed to be distracted | I Gave Birth For The First Time This Year, But I Was Already A Mother | The Subtle Genius of Elena Ferrante’s Bad Book Covers