The Lost Daughter
Olivia Colman turns in another complex, arresting performance in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s assured first feature.
It’s been an extraordinarily rich time for actresses trying their hand at directing, with Greta Gerwig leading the charge ahead of Olivia Wilde, Regina King, Clea DuVall, Emerald Fennell, Rebecca Hall and now Maggie Gyllenhaal. If characters are the life blood of cinema, then nobody should understand them better than an actor, and Gyllenhaal brings a complexity and ambiguity to Leda Caruso that is riveting. At once charming, intellectual, disarming and unpredictable, Leda is honed to lancet-like precision by Olivia Colman in another astonishing performance. Already voted best actress at the Gotham Independent Film Awards and nominated for a Golden Globe and short-listed by the London Film Critics’ Circle, Colman inhabits the many skins of Leda with a credibility and audacity that is this actress’s form.
Leda Caruso is on a working holiday on the Greek island of Spetses and brings with her a cargo of preconceptions, recriminations and memories. Initially enchanted with her sun-kissed retreat, the private beach and pristine ocean at her feet, her initial Paradise is quickly soured by darker elements lurking beneath the surface. The bounty in the welcoming fruit bowl in her apartment turns out to be rotting from underneath, an uninvited cicada takes up residence on her adjoining pillow and she is wounded by a falling pine cone. And then the other tourists turn up, shouting, screaming and jostling their way into her meticulously managed oasis of calm.
It’s hard to predict where The Lost Daughter is going, just as it’s impossible to read the character of Leda Caruso. Maybe the rowdy tourists are easier to construe, with their immediate, earthly needs – even when they break the rules of what is perceived to be right. Slyly, the film turns out to be about mothers and their children and so the Freudian memory triggers lead to the parallel story of the younger Leda, played by Jessie Buckley. We are, supposedly, the sum of our memories, even when the latter may be unreliable, and Leda is as erratic a protagonist as we might find in the cinema. Inviting the sociability of fellow vacationers, she will then cut them dead, as if backed into a corner she wasn’t expecting.
The art of Olivia Colman is that she retains her character’s reason, even when she’s behaving oddly. Maybe she’s right – it’s just us who are mistaken. At times, the film feels like a Patricia Highsmith thriller – but without its murderous intent – yet is so well unfolded that we follow its lead into the depths of the labyrinth. Of course, directing a film is a juggling act, and Maggie Gyllenhaal – who previously helmed an episode of Netflix’s Homemade – knows enough about her craft to keep the viewer both connected and believing. She has produced a mature, creditable and multi-layered drama, assuredly told and pleasingly crafted. At times, though, The Lost Daughter feels more cerebral than emotionally engaged, and if at the end it seems unresolved, it lingers in the brain like the aftermath of an elite, boozy and thought-provoking dinner party.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Mescal, Dagmara Domińczyk, Alba Rohrwacher, Jack Farthing, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Panos Koronis, Robyn Elwell, Ellie Blake.
Dir Maggie Gyllenhaal, Pro Charlie Dorfman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Osnat Handelsman-Keren and Talia Kleinhendler, Screenplay Maggie Gyllenhaal, from the novella by Elena Ferrante, Ph Helene Louvart, Pro Des Inbal Weinberg, Ed Affonso Gonçalves, Music Dickon Hinchliffe, Costumes Edward K. Gibbon, Dialect coaches Simone Spinazze and Sandra Butterworth.
Endeavor Content/Pie Films/Samuel Marshall Productions-Netflix.
122 mins. USA/Greece. 2020. US Rel: 17 December 2021. UK Rel: 31 December 2021. Cert. 15.
