On Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter
The Lost Daughter is a stunning representation of the shift in recent book to film adaptations and of modern perceptions on the role of motherhood. The story follows a middle-aged Leda (Olivia Colman) on her vacation in Greece which, at first glance, is serene and pleasant. Upon closer inspection, it slowly becomes more mysterious the longer she stays there. When Leda looks closer, the fruit in her hotel is rotten, cicadas wake her at night, a falling pine cone stabs her in the shoulder, and her solitude on the beach is interrupted by an obnoxious family. One family member in particular who catches Leda’s eye is Nina (Dakota Johnson), a young mother whose beauty is the kind by which every person on the beach is hypnotized.
However, Leda’s attention is primarily drawn to the struggle that Nina displays with her daughter Elena. Leda becomes enraptured by the similarities she identifies between Nina and her younger self. When Elena goes missing, shots of Nina and a younger Leda (Jessie Buckley) calling for their lost daughters are played back to back, almost blending into each other as their voices overlap. As Leda connects the similarities she finds in their experiences, her attachment to Nina grows. Leda inserts herself as a wiser mentor figure to Nina, who is immediately enthralled by Leda’s advice.
Leda’s relationship with her kids is more distant than a conventional mother-daughter relationship might be. This is made clear from her conversation with Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), Nina’s sister-in-law, and her first phone call with her youngest of two daughters, Martha. Leda has obvious contempt for Callie, who is suspicious of Leda’s attitude towards motherhood and her inability to give much detail about her daughters. Instead of gushing to Callie about how much she loves her daughters, the first thing Leda says about motherhood is that “children are a crushing responsibility.”
The Lost Daughter is maybe the only film I have seen that empathizes with the “unnatural mother” rather than villainizing her. A younger Leda and her husband, Joe, are both depicted as ambitious academics, striving for recognition in their respective fields. No matter how hard Leda tries, society’s expectations of her role as a mother seem to pull her away from her career and life goals. One scene, in particular, depicts this unfair responsibility quite well. In an attempt to mimic her mother’s orange peeling technique, Bianca, Joe and Leda’s youngest daughter, cuts her hand. Joe just so happens to be caught on an “important” phone call for his work, almost using it as an excuse for him to neglect his responsibility to help his daughter. Leda, who is less concerned about trying to make Bianca feel better and more irritated about the distraction from her work, ends up having to be the one to soothe Bianca. Leda’s contempt for the sacrifice she makes for Bianca at this moment mirrors her greater distaste she has for being a mother. The younger Leda understands that the sacrifice she makes would not only be this one time. It would continue to impede on her career and it will always be her that makes the sacrifice over her husband.
The Lost Daughter translates symbolism and allusion without giving its viewers extra guidance, something movie adaptations often do not. One of the story’s recurring themes is Leda’s connection to Elena’s lost doll. Leda reassures Nina that they will find the doll even though it was Leda herself who took it. She spends time cleaning and caring for Elena’s doll as if it was her own. When Nina asks why Leda took the doll, she simply responds “I don’t know.” The ambiguity of Leda’s motivations allows the viewer to look deeper into the decision-making of the film to construct their interpretations.
A flashback shows Bianca who had destroyed Leda’s childhood doll in protest of her mother’s detachment towards her. Leda says, “I gave that doll to you because I trusted you to take care of it.” Leda seems to view Elena much like her own daughter Bianca. In the present, she projects her past desire to take her doll away from her daughter onto Elena to show her what it feels like to lose something you love. Leda’s urge to repair the damage on Elena’s doll for the doll as if it were her daughter also reflects the greater idea that Leda is unfit for motherhood because children are not like dolls that need fixing, which she seems to lack understanding of.
Many scenes of young Leda show her studying comparative literature and translation. As she translates aloud, Bianca repeats the lines in Italian along with her. She recites a line she had memorized one night when Leda and Joe host dinner for passing travelers who happened to speak Italian. As her mother speaks to their guests in Italian, Bianca wants to participate. Leda often doesn’t seem to realize that Bianca just wants to be like her. Bianca uses the phrases she remembers her mother repeating and says, "Il gelo dell’ala sorta cade lungo il mio corpo.” Leda translates “Chill of the crooked wing falls down on my body,” and laughs the instance off as an inside joke between her and Bianca. (The line is from W.H. Auden’s The Crisis, a poem about the threat of invasion at the beginning of WWII, a striking comparison to the responsibility of having children “invading” Leda’s life.)
The Lost Daughter’s greatest strength is the questions it poses against society’s traditional perceptions of motherhood. Mothers, especially portrayed in media, to this day are still generally thought to love motherhood. Female characters are depicted to be objectively glad to have had their children and as a society, we often think of “good mothers” as “good women.”
In reality, it is an even more specific type of mother that society praises. Girls are supposed to strive towards marriage first and then devote themselves to being good wives by having children, often having to give up their careers. Teenage motherhood is often frowned upon and seen as cutting a young girl's possibility short. Once a woman reaches a certain age, it is not only encouraged, but expected that women have children. But, being a mother is not just a “full-time job” because it’s “full-time.” It’s a full-time job because it’s a job. We think of the maternal instinct as a qualification for the idea that all mothers have some sort of natural desire to sacrifice for their children. Leda’s narrative demonstrates a kind of motherhood that is rarely seen in media and proposes the idea that being a mother is not always a thing that comes naturally.