The Lost Daughter - Three of Them, Actually
Hello there. If you’re a new reader, please take a glance at my first post of Watchword to get a sense of why I’ve decided to write about television and streaming. And thanks to all of you who let me know that you read the first installment, and shared what you’re watching—so many options to explore! Some of you told me you stopped reading the first post because you hadn’t finished or even started Station Eleven. So I’ll resend that riff in a few weeks and try to avoid straight-out spoilers.
Mother’s Day is a few months off, but I’ve been thinking about Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, based on Elena Ferrante’s novel, and decided that although it is a feature-length film, it is fair game for Watchword.
A related digression explains why.
After finishing season three of Succession, I decided to slot Yellowstone into my family saga brain space. There’s a thread that connects the two—not only that they depict wealthy, dysfunctional family dynasties, but that they both contain daughters, Shiv Roy and Beth Dutton, with mothers whose absence defines their story arcs.
To be fair, I’m only a few episodes into season one of Yellowstone, so I don’t have the material to deeply compare Shiv and Beth. I’ll just say this: Shiv’s character, grasping, calculating, insecure and savage, is just way more layered than Beth’s, whose mean mouth, drug and alcohol addled heart and slinky-lingerie sexuality personify a very old-think approach to the depiction of women on the screen. Beth lost her mother to a riding accident when she was a pre-teen. Shiv was ten years old when her mother fled. Both daughters blame themselves, Beth more overtly than Shiv.
But Caroline Collingwood (Roy) didn’t go to the grave. She voluntarily withdrew from her children’s lives; her exit package from Logan seems to have required she stay away from rearing the children, in exchange for preserving the kids’ piece of the Waystar Royco fortune. Ultimately, though, she betrays her children, and in the final scenes of the season, we understand that Logan’s perfidious parenting is matched, maybe even exceeded in psychological treachery, by that of Lady Caroline.
Speaking of parenting: about halfway through The Lost Daughter, I began to sense that for Olivia Coleman’s Leda to release herself from the pain of having abandoned her young daughters two decades earlier, some sort of physical violence would have to trigger her, and their, ultimate reconciliation. “I’m an unnatural mother,” Leda confesses. But Leda’s organic, albeit complex, connection to her babies, is the essence of the story.
We see it in the way she transfixes her daughters’ gaze while deftly peeling an orange, all and always in one bouncy strip of rind. By the very end of the movie, a flashback to one of these moments makes clear that the orange is a navel orange. It’s one of the few, quite explicit directorial dot-connecting moments Maggie Gyllenhaal delivers her audience. And it comes right on the heels of that violence the film builds toward. (NB: finish the film now if you haven’t already) A hair pin plunges directly into Leda’s navel—her womb, in other words. There’s some speculation over whether she dies from the wound. (I have a view on that).
But there’s no ambiguity that the puncture into her own navel transports Leda to a palpably ecstatic connection to her daughters. Her last words to her (now found) daughters, “Tell me all about it,” and the expression on Coleman’s face, one of uncomplicated presence and joy in allowing her daughters access, reveal precisely the kind of maternal giving over that Shiv and Beth still crave. But, if as I surmise, only death can bring Leda a kind of purity in finding herself in her connection to her daughters, at what cost motherhood?
That’s Gyllenhaal’s agonizing question.
I love reading your comments and promise to reply to each one of your notes. I know we’re past the holidays, and possibly sad to have missed some family time because of Omicron. So I’ll send my favorite children’s book about the prosaic pleasures (and annoyances) of family gatherings to the first person who writes me about their perspective on mother-daughter story arcs. Just include a mailing address.
Until the next,
Julia