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The Lost Daughter
The Lost Daughter
The Lost Daughter circles around a lost doll that a professor of Italian literature finds while vacationing on a Greek island. That professor, Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman), finds the doll and isn’t giving it back to the little girl or her mom. The doll is one of the triggers for memories of her fraught motherhood two decades earlier.
The Lost Daughter won an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, but one assumes that the book, by the mysterious Italian literary sensation Elena Ferrante, was better. More deservedly, Colman gained a Best Actress nod for Leda, a character whose inner turmoil roils her placid surface. Jesse Buckley is also nominated for Best Supporting Actress playing Leda as a distraught young mother setting sights on an academic career.
Directed by actress Maggie Gyllenhaal in her debut as a feature filmmaker, The Lost Daughter sways to and fro from then to now. That’s not the problem. The novel’s intriguing premise eventually endows the film with gradually accumulating interest but getting there is a long slog through slack editing, smudgy close-ups, banal conversation and uninspired cinematography. That premise has to do with the memories we bury and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Irritable and occasionally rude for no good reason, Colman handles Leda’s character with a deft touch.
Her vacation in Greece turns less than ideal. The boisterous Greek American visitors and their family on the island add a premonition of unfulfilled menace while triggering more memories. That stolen doll is the catalyst for recalling her wobbly balance 20 years earlier between two squealing, demanding daughters and her nascent rise in academia. Some of the film’s best scenes concern the erotic potential of words that result in the mutual seduction between young Leda and an admiring professor.
Ed Harris is a bright spot in a small role as an American expat working stiff on the island with memories of meeting Leonard Cohen long ago.
