The Lost Daughter Review: An Explicit Rendering of Elena Ferrante’s Mysteries

Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel The Lost Daughter is an unhurried dive into the not-so-nice thoughts and actions of a divorced middle-aged professor named Leda as she vacations at an Italian coastal town. Leda spends her time observing the members of a loud and uncouth Italian American family, eventually interacting with them in increasingly dramatic ways, and privately reflecting on the horrors of motherhood. She has two daughters of her own, both of whom are grown and living very far away, and as she observes everyone around her, the reader comes to slowly understand just how much she treasures her alone time.

The novel is about a woman finally granting herself the right to feel, say, and do what good mothers are supposed to suppress in order to avoid public scorn. It’s also about the inconsistencies, ambiguities, and sheer incoherence of love. Its nuance is impressive, which makes it all the more disappointing that Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film adaptation mostly renders explicit all of the things that Ferrante’s writing doesn’t make so readily apparent.

For one, the film sets out to find logical explanations for Leda’s bad decisions—walking out on her family in the past, stealing a little girl’s doll in the present—rather than allowing the character to bask in her belated deliverance. As played by Olivia Colman, the present-day Leda is all about inextinguishable guilt. She’s dared to refuse the unspeakable burden of maternal devoutness, but something is still eating away at her. By contrast, Ferrante sees her as exorcising her guilt through rumination, and a little bit of recklessness. In the novel, Leda’s reminiscences don’t exist to offer up causal and reductive links between past and present.

In the film, Leda spends her holidays on the Greek island of Spetses, observing the same rough and vulgar family detailed in Ferrante’s book. At one point, the very pregnant matriarch of that family, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), asks Leda to move her umbrella and beach chair. Leda, though, dares to say no, after which a perverse and quietly revengeful resentment bubbles up and over every interaction that Leda has with Callie and her family members.

For a while, Colman’s performance carries the film, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness. And it’s in Colman’s expressive face that Gyllenhaal rests the sophistication of Ferrante’s writing. The actress masterfully depicts the complexities, contradictions, and the unspeakable awkwardness of being a woman alone in public. But there comes a point where Leda ceases to be an astute intellectual finding solace in loneliness and in discrete acts of madness. She becomes a gauche spectacle, parading a distinctly English inability to handle her emotions, particularly sexual ones, around the island like a fool, or a Karen-esque killjoy.

The pleasures of watching Colman, irrespective of how her performance deviates from the Leda depicted in the book, are constantly interrupted by Gyllenhaal’s dependance on flashbacks. Throughout, we see a younger Leda (Jessie Buckley) doing all of the things a mother shouldn’t do—cheating on her husband (Jack Farthing), neglecting her girls, and eventually abandoning them all—and which have led to Leda’s present life.

These blasts from the past serve an unabashedly explanatory function, whereas one of the most fascinating aspects of Ferrante’s novel is the way that Leda’s actions are left unexplained. The flashbacks also make The Lost Daughter a rather redundant film. Or rather, two films inside one: Colman’s, so full of perplexity and life, and the companion one that’s meant to elucidate all of the obscurities that made Ferrante’s story so pleasurable in the first place.