Newport This Week

Films Take Revealing Looks at Mothers and Daughters



Dakota Johnson, left, and Olivia Colman deliver searing performances as mothers who share a complex connection in

Dakota Johnson, left, and Olivia Colman deliver searing performances as mothers who share a complex connection in “The Lost Daughter.”

Fans of Elena Ferrante’s piercing 2008 novel, “The Lost Daughter” won’t be disappointed by direc­tor Maggie Gyllenhaal’s alternate­ly sumptuous and sharp-edged screen version now on Netflix.

The Lost Daughter” is one of the best films of 2021 and should earn deserved Oscar nominations for its star, Olivia Colman, and for Jessie Buckley, superbly cast as Colman’s younger self.

Best known as an actress on HBO’s “The Deuce,” Gyllenhaal, who also adapted Ferrante’s nov­el, makes a stunning big screen directing debut. She captures the complex psychology of the central character, Leda Caruso, an aca­demic on holiday, and the sensual atmosphere that slowly reveals Leda’s increasingly fragile state as she drifts between the present and memories of the past.

Even though Gyllenhaal has shifted the action from Italy to the Greek coast, she conveys the dark and light, the bold and delicate, of Ferrante’s story. When a stranger’s toddler daughter disappears one day from the beach, Leda finds her and befriends the little girl’s mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson). Leda’s vacation quickly turns into a conduit for searing recollections and harsh regrets about raising her own two daughters.

Emilie Bierre stars as an exploited teenager in the powerful French drama

Emilie Bierre stars as an exploited teenager in the powerful French drama “Les Notres.”

Buckley, as the younger Leda, matches Colman’s self-possession, discipline and energy in depicting a mother who often must make the wrenching choice of career over children, with the emotional scars to show for it. As Leda admits to Nina’s sister-in-law one after­noon, “Children are a crushing re­sponsibility.”

But “The Lost Daughter” is no artsy “Mommie Dearest.” Movies have rarely explored a woman’s ambivalence toward motherhood with such honesty and empathy.

Images and themes, especially mothers, daughters and dolls that recur in Ferrante’s later work, are all here, gracefully reimagined for the screen by Gyllenhaal, brilliant cinematographer Helene Louvart and the sublime cast.

Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.

Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.

Among several recent films, such as “Groomed” and “Slalom” about the sexual manipulation and abuse of young girls, French direc­tor

Jeanne Leblanc’s “Les Notres” (“Our Own”), available on demand, is memorable for its seeming “nor­mal” depiction of smalltown life until it gradually turns dark and uncomfortable.

The film is set in a village in Que­bec, where neighbors helped each other cope with the off-screen tragedy of a factory fire that killed several key characters. As the film opens, Mayor Jean-Marc Ricard (Paul Doucet) takes credit for the aftermath of the fire with a ded­ication of a park to victims and survivors. One of those survivors is 13-year-old Magalie (Emilie Bierre), whose father died in the inferno and whose loving, grieving moth­er Isabelle (Marianne Farley) not only reveres Jean-Marc, as all the townspeople do, but also works for him.

It’s these tangled interpersonal dynamics that make this film so horrific once we learn that Maga­lie is pregnant and she insists on protecting her abuser. That her abuser is Jean-Marc is not a spoiler; Leblanc lays out all the clues with delicate precision.

“Les Notres” is quietly and pow­erfully disturbing, because it de­picts the sinister nature of groom­ing and predation almost entirely though Magalie’s viewpoint, even though she has no experience or ability to cope with such a situa­tion. Her mother reaches out, and the film subtly portrays a realistic mother/daughter relationship. But Magalie remains silent. Her acqui­escence in her own victimization is one of the most harrowing aspects of the film, even though it portrays the child’s complicity without sen­sationalism.

Leblanc co-wrote this devas­tating script with Judith Baribeau, who stars in the key role of Jean- Marc’s wife and the mother of their two adopted boys who figure prominently in the plot. Her char­acter arc is suspenseful and sur­prising, as is all of this compelling, well-crafted film.

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