Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter. Image: Netflix/IMDb
In the opening scenes of The Lost Daughter, adapted from Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novella, forty-eight-year-old Harvard professor and protagonist Leda Caruso (Olivia Coleman) basks in a picture of childless freedom.
En route to a solo working-holiday in Greece and behind the driver’s seat, Leda wears an oversized soft blue button-up shirt, and dark cat-eye sunglasses that sit grand above her cheekbones. Soaring around winding bends, she breathes in the early dusk air, backdropped by Greece’s coastal ports and a gradient skyline. In this scene we are boldly introduced to Dickon Hinchliffe’s striking soundtrack featuring an arrangement of piano that harmonises with the classic hammond organ; such melodies recur throughout the film to provide a distinctive sense of creeping drama.
Pulling up at her villa, Leda is greeted by Lyle (Ed Harris), a rugged and dependable man in his seventies, who takes her luggage and shows her through the property. His demeanour indifferent, he tells her he has looked after the property ‘and others’ for thirty years. The mood shifts deftly as dark shadows engulf the space and a nearby lighthouse hums abruptly, hinting at something more sinister lurking among paradise.
‘The lighthouse’, Lyle explains, ‘it’s not all the time’.
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The topic of ‘maternal ambivalence’ has been increasingly explored among feminist discourse in recent decades, enabling a wide examination of motherhood and its prescribed sensibilities under patriarchy. In addition to academic texts and grassroots discussion, a growing number of fictional and memoir-centred projects have been inspired by and continue to explore this topic.
In most of these stories, the audience always receives a resolution of sorts—a version of female subjectivity that inevitably taps into an undeniable maternal capability by virtue of being a woman. Sometimes this capability is subverted, and the ‘bad mother’ is rendered irredeemable, but other imperfect mothers almost always ‘come to their senses’, ultimately stepping up to the plate of parenthood.
In most of these stories, imperfect mothers almost always ‘come to their senses’, ultimately stepping up to the plate of parenthood.
Penny Marshall’s Riding In Cars With Boys (2001) cleverly examines the intersections of maternal ambivalence and class, and more subtly sheds light on the long-term and devastating repercussions of emotional parentification (in which an adult leans on a child for support in a borderline abusive fashion). The film follows Beverly Donofrio (Drew Barrymore), a working-class sixteen-year-old whose dreams of being a writer are waylaid by an unexpected pregnancy. Desperately unhappy as a wife and mother, she resents her son and at one point tells him he ruined her life—though as many a tale would go, Riding In Cars With Boys eventually puts audiences at ease, with Bev in the end reassuring her son, ‘I want to make something clear. I don’t think I would’ve been better off without you. You are not what went wrong with anything’.
Similarly, in the highly acclaimed 2021 Netflix miniseries Maid, protagonist Alex’s (Margaret Qualley) mother Paula (Qualley’s real-life mother Andie MacDowell) is infuriating in the first few episodes. Alex calls on her mother for minimal levels of support while she flees domestic violence and urgently tries to get back on her feet. Paula, however, is too caught up and distracted to see the seriousness of the situation, though she is mentally unwell and in a precarious situation herself. Her daughter and granddaughter both need her on a practical and emotional level, and quite desperately—why can’t she see that? But as the series progresses and character development is enriched, we are afforded empathy towards Paula, gradually privy to the imperfect but unique ways in which she inevitably shows up for her daughter.
Throughout The Lost Daughter, however, runs a sense of ongoing dissonance, an exhilarating sense of unresolve not unlike a psychological thriller. Director Maggie Gyllenhaal, in her debut film, never quite lands on any one side of the cultural binary, masterfully lingering among interpolated ground instead. Audiences have been primed by the conventions of the genre to expect that the film will eventually clarify its position on whether Leda is a good mother, or a bad one. But Leda—along with the nuances carried through plot—is ever contradicting. Her posture is confident and upright, but simultaneously awkward; she’s provocative and hostile, though child-like and eager to connect. Often, her dialogue is sharp; at other times she overshares through long bumbling monologues. Similarly contrasting is the camera’s gaze which shifts from Leda’s acute point of view, to shots through symmetrical door frames that look in on her insecure demeanour from a nearby room.
Throughout The Lost Daughter runs a sense of ongoing dissonance, an exhilarating sense of unresolve not unlike a psychological thriller.
The film accommodates two storylines: one of current, middle-aged Leda holidaying in Greece, and a second narrative which is portrayed through flashbacks of Leda’s younger self (Jessie Buckley) living marital life with two daughters who are both still under eight.
These flashback scenes are shot with golden hues and warm natural light. We see intimate close ups of Leda’s soft and slightly flushed cheeks, skin unblemished. Her body is slim, able to slip effortlessly into the op-shop-meets-preppy attire of a young, soon-to-be elite academic. But Buckley’s Leda is exhausted, ‘suffocating’ under the daily grind of parenthood while juggling the emergence of her academic career.
Scenes of present-day Leda are produced in contrast to younger Leda, with a crisper edge and a film noir influence. Here cinematographer Hélène Louvart, who shot The Lost Daughter on a handheld Ronin camera, plays masterfully with light, lingering on faces in gritty, up close frames.
Jessie Buckley in The Lost Daughter. Image: Netflix/IMDb
The plot centres on both Leda, and members of a large Greek American family holidaying from Queens, becoming mutually fascinated with one another. Eerie beach scenes show Leda lazing about while quietly looking on, observing the women in the family. Most closely, she watches young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), who is battling a strong-willed almost-three-year-old coupled with exhaustion.
Leda’s curiosity of the women is reciprocated. They approach her with probing conversation, long-held gazes, and an air or eroticism that too remains ambiguous. Nina clearly flirts with Leda, though it is unclear if her charm is intended as romantic or reflective of a more desperate yearning for help.
‘I’m really tired. I’m like, scary tired’, Nina tells Leda.
‘I remember’, says Leda.
Metaphor and tropes are interwoven throughout, from a recurring motif of the bearing of fruit, to Leda’s embodiment of the French Flâneuse—albeit a gendered one who is routinely interrogated everywhere she goes. Everybody Leda meets on the island wants a piece of her. Much like the film’s recent critics, everybody is trying to make sense of her. But we never do.
What we can infer though, beyond Gyllenhaal’s refusal to reassure us of Leda’s maternal compass, is that the film is an intelligent comment on parenting under capitalist neoliberalism—what crime fiction scholar Ruth Cain refers to as ‘neoliberal mothering’.
‘Exhaustion, financial and time poverty have thus become dominant themes in the popular and journalistic literature on contemporary motherhood’, writes Cain, who suggests that the crime fiction genre enables an effective means of examining the ugliest parts of motherhood. ‘There is a particular (and neglected) openness in the crime genre to the stories and subjectivities of unusual and transgressive women’.
Under neoliberalism, women are insidiously expected to attain and perform a certain aesthetic of motherhood… ‘Having it all’ means doing it all.
Similarly, cultural theorist Angela McRobbie writes of contemporary representations of motherhood as contextualised typically as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Drawing on Foucault’s framework of biopolitics, McRobbie points to the colonial state and its ‘imperialist’ agenda as denoting continued use of the maternal white woman—not only as the bearers of future generations of (white) children, but as exemplary models for the standard of norms surrounding femininity.
Today, ideas of ‘affluent, middle-class maternity’, as McRobbie puts it, skew the traditional binary of post-World War II motherhood as an economic-fuelled aspiration, versus the modern archetypal career woman who either has children later in life, or not at all. Under neoliberalism, and in spite of drastic inflation, women are insidiously expected to attain and perform a certain aesthetic of motherhood, combined with professional, artistic and/or academic success. ‘Having it all’ means doing it all.
Certainly, Leda is white, middle-class, and ostensibly able-bodied. She is educated and has a leg up in terms of surpassing structural barriers. Her younger self also has a seemingly engaged, loyal and financially contributing partner. Yet her ambivalence remains, and to some degree, transcends factors of class and economic reach. In the younger Leda’s world, she too is drowning under the weight of neoliberalised aspirational culture in the face of her decision to simultaneously become a parent.
‘Within the prevailing logic of the new conservative feminism there is an expectation that such women will re-enter employment or become entrepreneurs,’ writes McRobbie, ‘for the reason that personal identity and middle-class status for women nowadays rest on occupation and economic activity and not solely on being a wife and mother.’
In other words, social status and the metrics of success have shifted as acquired through deeply encoded ideas around high volumes of laborious output, almost exclusively in individual efforts to overcome system failures, domestically and professionally. It is, as McRobbie explains, a new model that encourages ‘more intense investment in marriage, motherhood and domestic life as a benchmark of successful femininity.’
Ask any mother or carer raising young people under the current system, and they will likely look up from tired eyes and blemished skin and tell you of the deep, dark depths of exhaustion faced by such an undertaking.
In a culture of neatly packaged moral postures, it is refreshing to see a work that prioritises nuance over verdict.
In this way, The Lost Daughter follows on from and complicates the era of the contemporary corporate woman caricature who struggles to juggle it all in a day (think Anne Hathaway in The Intern, or The Devil Wears Prada). Certainly, it is interesting to view Gyllenhaal’s directorial decision-making in The Lost Daughter in light of her earlier acting role in Mona Lisa Smile (2003), which directly dissects ideas of successful femininity.
But The Lost Daughter is anything but didactic. It is highly nuanced and an eerily slow burn at times—its artistry and brilliance lie in its ambiguity and resistance to resolution.
Instead, the film offers a refreshing portrayal of women suffocating under the same system, despite access, education and success, that neoliberal culture promised would afford them fulfilment; a system dictated by a highly privatised, hyper-individualist economy centred on consumer apathy and vast labour, in and outside the home.
The Lost Daughter is both a comment and a refusal of sorts, constructed through screen narrative that unapologetically withholds conventional denouement. In a culture of neatly packaged moral postures, it is refreshing to see a work that prioritises nuance over verdict.
In many ways, motherhood and the rotating daily grind mirrors that of Lyle’s lighthouse; some nights, light is emitted and a sense of seeing one’s way through feels conceivable. Other times, a relentless shadow is cast, with mothers swimming among an impossible system, left wondering how they will make it through the dark.
The Lost Daughter is available on Netflix.
