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.
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.
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.
Leave a Reply