Review: ‘Lost Daughter’ depicts traumatic motherhood

Middle-aged literary scholar Lida (Olivia Colman) is on an extended vacation alone in Greece. I’ve taken a job with her, but she’s calm and quiet on the boat. Suddenly a group of Greek-born queens thundered and took over the beach. A cheerful young mother (Dakota Johnson) is having a hard time managing her five-year-old daughter. Lida can’t tear her eyes away from the chaotic mother-daughter relationship that unfolds in the harsh Mediterranean light. Traumatic memories from her mother’s life are activated before the eyes of the viewers.

Elena Ferrante, the literary world’s most secretive writer, wrote The Shadow of a Daughter (2006) in which she studies many of the themes, characters and events (the doll cast is important) that would characterize the world-famous Neapolitan quartet. . Oscar-nominated screenwriting Maggie Gyllenhaal is firmly on her feet, and some significant but true changes are taking place in the spirit itself.

Olivia Colman (“The Favorite”, “The Crown”) She interprets a totally unique role that only confirms that she is the biggest star of her generation at the moment. Few can use physics, gestures, and facial expressions to shape internal emotional states in such a way that words and explanations are unnecessary.

Jesse Buckley from “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” (Oscar and Coleman nominated here) plays Leda as a young mother with a nervous presence. She vacillates between warm love evaluations and icy divergence, with all the feelings on her body on the outside. Suddenly changed the feeling of helplessness hampering their intellectual development, the joy of demonstrating tenderness, the children’s arms clinging to the back, the yearning for closeness. It swings all the time. Not pretty, cruel sometimes.

Today’s lead is Like an insecure emotional grenade. Her straightness and cocky demeanor greatly impress her surroundings while provoking many men of different ages who try to approach her, sometimes violently, but she doesn’t let anyone in. It is the image of the independent woman who does not seem to need someone who does not want to please and does not need to ask. A strange, angular, but indomitable liberated female image – an interesting bourgeois counterpart to the character of Frances McDormand in “Nomadland”.

The “Lost Daughter” may not tell anything new about a woman’s experience of being torn between home, children, and a profession that places great demands on one’s thought time. But it does so in a way that still looks new, especially perhaps because it’s a movie that doesn’t have any beauty filters. Maggie Gyllenhaal constantly leaves the narrative behind feelings. The camera moves around searching and crawling close to people, seemingly wanting all their ugly secrets. For every flashback that is seamlessly inserted, we are drawn more and more to Lida’s memories of the unconventional and hurtful motherhood that cost her and her children so much.

“Lost Daughter” is aptly said, but it is sometimes a traumatic experience. An emotional storm of low intensity rages under the scorching Greek sun.

See more. Three more films with Olivia Colman at her best: “The Favorite” (2018), “Father” (2020), “Mothering Sunday” (2022).

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