MOTHERS AT A LOSS

Maggie Gyllenhaal confronts an enduring cultural taboo head-on in her big-screen directorial debut, writes Tymon Smith

There’s a grim aura of melancholic portent that hangs heavily over every frame of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s moving feature directorial debut The Lost Daughter. Adapted from the novel by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, it is the story of a middleaged comparative literature professor named Leda (Olivia Colman) who takes herself on a solo holiday to a fictional Greek island. While there, her idyllic solitude is rudely interrupted by the arrival of a large Greek-American family from Queens who take occupancy of the small local beach for the summer. They become, increasingly, an object of curiosity and a depressing obsession for Leda, who finds herself drifting back through time to memories of her youth and early, difficult experiences as a young mother. Her two daughters are now adults, absent and living their own lives.

The catalyst for Leda’s uncomfortable trip down memory lane is Nina (Dakota Johnson), a young, pretty member of the American family who is clearly having a hard time in her own role as mother to a moody, spoilt daughter. When the daughter goes missing and creates a brief moment of high-adrenaline panic for the Americans, Leda quietly comes to the rescue, locating the child and returning her to her family.

Strangely, Leda decides to hold on to the girl’s beloved favourite doll, which she sneaks off to her apartment to dote on and play mother to, perhaps in an effort to make up for what she sees, in hindsight, as her own youthful selfishness and failures as a mother.

Everything moves carefully forward to what you might expect would be some sort of terrible, thrilling and suitably psychotic conclusion, but ultimately not much really happens. Leda’s complex and unreliable shifts of mood and expression are, however, completely engaging and compelling, and keep you on the edge of your seat as surely as if you were watching a thriller.

That’s thanks to Gyllenhaal’s admirably expert control of the material and a sophisticated focusing of the themes of the film away from the predictable battle between career and motherhood and towards the more difficult contortions of an examination of the discomforting question of whether being a mother destroys certain parts of a woman’s character irreparably in spite of her love for her children.

This tension is brilliantly conveyed by Colman’s outstanding central performance as Leda, who is still wrecked by an unnerving and heartbreaking sense of guilt at what she sees as her failure to adequately balance her needs and those of her daughters, and for which she continues to punish herself. When she looks at Nina, she can’t help imposing her own path of misguided choices on the younger woman, who is obviously at her own emotionally significant crossroads in her journey as a mother. When Leda observes the closeness of Nina’s family, she is reminded of the fragile bonds of family that she wasn’t able to keep together. Gyllenhaal is herself the mother of two young daughters with her husband, actor Peter Sarsgaard, who plays a small but pivotal role in the film. She makes a bold, pioneering decision to open a space in the cinematic universe to tackle this issue head-on.

The result is an ambitious, mostly successful psychological drama that eschews judgment of its characters or easy resolutions in favour of an empathetic examination of their lived experiences. ‘The Lost Daughter’ is on circuit