The Lost Daughter

The Lost Daughter is a largely successful adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is responsible for the screenplay and direction, has made a striking first feature that contains first rate performances from a sterling cast: Olivia Colman, Ed Harris, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Paul Mescal, Dagmara Dominczyk and Ms. Gyllenhaal's spouse, Peter Sarsgaard. 

Gyllenhaal has changed the setting from Italy to Greece and Anglicized most of the characters, but has captured the book's mood and mysteries. Colman plays Leda, a scholar on holiday, who becomes fixated on a young mother and her daughter. Through flashbacks where Ms. Buckley plays the younger Leda, we learn that Leda's own traumatic relationship with her daughters drives her actions during the course of the film. 

Ms. Gyllenhaal does a good job of evoking claustrophobia and the peculiar sense one feels of being  buffeted by forces outside one's control while on holiday. Rain interrupts the festivities and not for a sodden kiss. The pebble beach is crowded and the resort is a little tatty. A fitting stage for an ambivalent mystery where sociopathology battles psychopathology. Gyllenhaal's direction is a little pat for a work that is soaked with ambiguity, but this is the best acted film of the year and an exemplary first feature.

Addendum (1/18/22)

I have heretofore omitted any mention of the use of Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" in The Lost Daughter. It adds another dimension to what is already a complex text in book or film form. Here is the sonnet:

                                                          Leda and the Swan

                                      A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

                                     Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

                                     By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

                                     He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

                                    How can these terrified fingers push

                                    The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

                                    And how can body, laid in that white rush,

                                    But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

                                   A shudder in the loins engenders there

                                  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

                                  And Agamemnon dead,

                                                                         Being so caught up,

                                  so mastered by the brute blood of the air,

                                  Did she put on his knowledge with his power

                                  Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

                                                                                                       1923

The erotic thrust that links "Leda and the Swan" and The Lost Daughter is too obvious to elaborate on. The Lost Daughter's Leda has two daughters like her mythic counterpart. As Yeats illustrates, Leda's daughters (Helen and Clytemnestra) helped bring on tumult and madness. Exactly what lies beneath the surface of The Lost Daughter.