Olivia Colman is at her best as a middle-aged woman harboring secrets in ‘The Lost Daughter,’ Maggie Gyllenhaal’s stealthy thriller of a directorial debut. Read K. Austin Collins’ review.
That’s Ferrante. It’s where this mysterious, adamantly ambivalent author focuses the energies of her fiction. An adaptation of her work can muss the finer details of her plots or rearrange things to make them more adaptable to screen, cutting characters, deploying cinematic devices not used on the page.
And so, if her film is any indication, does Gyllenhaal, who, with Colman as Leda, gets that Ferrante feeling churning almost as soon as the film starts, when Leda arrives at the coastal villa that will be her home for the coming summer weeks. But she’s arrived later than expected, and being that she’s a scholar for whom vacation is always a chance at catching up on work, her bags are full of books.
Gyllenhaal’s film, which the director adapted from the novel herself, makes good on the promise of Ferrante-style psychologizing, which is to say, it takes the novel’s first-person moseying through association and event and offers us an analogous series of repetitions, flashbacks, echoes — all of the things that amount to internal reflection, doubt, and a nearly neurotic aptitude for self-analysis.
This isn’t a story about growing older and wiser, however. For one thing, Leda’s life is populated by flirtations. Take, for example, Will. Paul Mescal has one job in this movie — to charm the pants off a maybe-lonely, but not desperate, older woman. Suffice it to say, he succeeds. But is it Leda he wants, or something beyond the confines of these villas and the family that rules them? And what about the older Lyle? Leda’s popular, what can she say.
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