Each character in vain tries to circumvent their filial role: Lyle living in near solitude in the endless summer of this Greek locale Nina finding comfort in a lover and Leda in her younger years absconding abroad. It’s the desire to run away when the parental mantle you are ill-equipped for becomes untenable. The personal shortcomings of flawed parents is the dramatic churn of Gyllenhaal’s film. “I’m an unnatural mother,” Leda later explains to Nina. They’re two of a kind, imperfect parents to their respective children. The parallel gains deepend the relationship between Leda and Lyle. Mixed with a sparse environment rife for contemplation, none of the interiors or exteriors are ostentatious, the mood concerning past loves and distant children resembling Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight. Louvart’s photography captures the sun as a character it can make the hues of the brown sand, the verdant green trees, and crystal blue waters almost overbearingly vibrant. The Lost Daughter soaks itself in extremes. Seeing mother and daughter interact unmoors Leda, and painful memories of raising Bianca and Marta shake her, causing fainting spells. Leda can also be wistful: She watches the overwhelmed Nina struggle to care for Elena. Flirtatious fissures erupt causing mischievous smiles to creep across Colman’s face. At other times the ecstasy of escape consumes her face and frame: Such as the late-night revelry her and Lyle share dancing to Bon Jovi. When Callie, for instance, asks her to move her umbrella, the chipper lips of Leda turn down to reveal scorn. The expressive Colman seizes these moments with aplomb. The camera, rarely hurried in how long it settles on a character, constantly searches Colman’s face for the wellspring of conflicting emotion gushing from her. Unlike the impulses of many other filmmakers, including exceptional ones like Ridley Scott in House of Gucci, the filmmakers here have broken through the staid, repetitive visual language of medium compositions and embraced the power of the close-up. Gyllenhaal and cinematographer Helene Louvart discover extensive complexities over the terrain of these actors’ faces. Nina (Dakota Johnson) and Leda (Olivia Colman) on the beach Photo: YANNIS DRAKOULIDIS/NETFLIX The Lost Daughter, a sharply crafted, clear-eyed interrogation of less-than-likable parents, ebbs and flows on the strength of this reality, along with a few immense performers from its veteran ensemble. In fact, the film very much says that sometimes being a mom is the worst thing that can happen to a person. In conducting the drama, Gyllenhaal is frank about the hardships of motherhood, and the idea that not every person is cut out for the task (in that regard the film works well in complement to Mike Mills’ recent C’Mon C’Mon).
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Gyllenhaal confirms as much in a series of flashbacks to Leda’s younger years (played by the always fantastic Jessie Buckley), when she was a comparative literature grad student balancing her studies with caring for her precocious daughters. Leda sees a portion of herself in Nina, a young woman struggling with motherhood. Conversely Leda becomes obsessed with Callie’s relatives: Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter Elena (Athena Martin). The family’s matriarch, a pregnant Callie (Dagmara Domińczyk), displeases Leda through her micro-aggressions. Her downtime is interrupted, however, when she meets a noxious family with little regard for the people around them. As does the young, cheerful Irish student Will (Paul Mescal).
The older caretaker Lyle (a still dashing Ed Harris) seems to have eyes for her. Leda thinks she’s discovered such a place at a resort’s sunny beach. Based on a novel by Elena Ferrante, actor Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut follows Leda, a mother of two adult daughters, Bianca and Marta, searching for a quiet corner to read, write, and relax.
“I’m a very selfish person,” explains Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman), a literary professor taking a workcation in a seaside Greek town in The Lost Daughter.
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