The Lost Daughter, 2021.
Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Starring Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Paul Mescal, Peter Sarsgaard, Dagmara Domińczyk and Ed Harris.
SYNOPSIS:
A translator on an idyllic holiday becomes obsessed with a young mother, inspiring her to think back to her own parenting methods.
I often wonder how I would’ve reacted if someone had tapped me on the shoulder in the mid-to-late noughties and told me that Olivia Colman would become the queen of prestige drama and one of the most talented actors on the planet. As a big fan of both Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look, I was well aware of her brilliance, but it didn’t seem likely that, within the space of a decade or so, she’d be an Oscar winner and the sort of performer who could anchor a film like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter.
Colman is the brilliantly named academic Leda Caruso – an expert in Italian literature, taking a sort of half-break from work on a Greek island. She’s sharing the resort with an American family, including young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson). Leda is fascinated by Nina from afar and obsessively watches the family’s interactions with tears in her eyes, triggering flashbacks of her own parenting of her two daughters, with Jessie Buckley portraying the younger Leda.
It’s a complex tale, adapted from a novel by Elena Ferrante, that never overplays its hand or slips into awards-baiting histrionics. It exists largely at a quiet, subtle register and trusts Colman to convey the interior turmoil of her character with physicality and facial expressions, rather than lengthy pages of dialogue. Colman is able to turn Leda’s personality on a dime, whether that’s likeable and tragic or prickly and unpleasant. It’s a virtuoso performance of control, conveying every year of a life lived nursing regrets.
Gyllenhaal’s film also hands out two other plum roles to female stars, with Jessie Buckley allowed to shimmer as the younger Leda. She grows to resent her children as her academic career begins to flourish and she is showered with acclaim and affection by an attractive professor (Peter Sarsgaard), who excites her and seems to share many of her interests, leading to the heart-breaking decision which feels like a ground zero for Leda’s present day regrets. Dakota Johnson, meanwhile, delights in the other key role. She has this terrifying, magnetic ability to stare through someone, as if her eyes are tunnelling into their soul, just as she did to Ellen DeGeneres in their infamous, viral chat show segment.
Occasionally, the movie is a little heavy-handed. Symbolism about a bowl of rotten fruit is decidedly on the nose and the idea of Johnson’s character’s family as “bad people” is a little too obvious when characterising a brash, noisy family from New York City. The film isn’t always able to tie its elements together and there’s a strange, meandering quality to it that means it’s sometimes as confusing as it is enthralling. But when the next scene might feature Olivia Colman literally running away after a disastrous flirting attempt or rocking out without a care in the world to Bon Jovi, that’s merely a minor quibble.
And there’s no doubt that this movie belongs to Colman above and beyond anything else. As an actor herself, Gyllenhaal is smart enough to allow her leading lady to carry the lion’s share of the storytelling depth and point the camera at her deeply expressive face. She’s a performer of tremendous nuance, which makes her a perfect fit for a slippery and unusual movie that takes great pleasure in wrong-footing the viewer and shifting loyalties between characters from scene to scene. People are strange, complex beasts, and that’s something thoroughly embraced by The Lost Daughter. And the tragic, confusing, effortlessly charming Colman might be the strangest of us all. I hope she never changes.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Tom Beasley is a freelance film journalist and wrestling fan. Follow him on Twitter via @TomJBeasley for movie opinions, wrestling stuff and puns.
