*Spoilers for ‘The Lost Daughter’ ahead*
Usually when we think of movies set in remote, luxurious Greek landscapes, images of Meryl Streep and ABBA populate in our head, à la Mamma Mia! But picture this instead — Olivia Colman in sunglasses driving down a remote road while a moody, vintage James Bond-esque soundtrack by Dickon Hinchcliffe (which I’m currently streaming on repeat) fills the serendipitous main-character moment. In this opening sequence, we’ve established the barest nature of Colman’s character, Leda Caruso: a solitary, escapist, selfish solipsist.
When I say selfish, I don’t mean it with any malice. Selfishness is bred from a desire to survive, out of necessity for one’s own health and well-being. But that doesn’t mean guilt and regret cannot arise when one puts themselves first over family, friends and the needs of others.
When we first meet Lena we don’t have any knowledge that informs or gives context to this selfishness, all we see is a quiet, 40-something year-old woman taking a trip to a Greek resort with an invasive lighthouse, a bowl of rotten fruit on the table (more on that later) and an awkward yet well-meaning groundskeeper by the name of Lyle (played by Ed Harris).
But the tension in this film is a slow yet steady drip that suddenly fills the viewer to the brim with the notion that something about Leda isn’t right or necessarily all there. She’s a image of a disturbed, reserved and regretful academic in a luxurious beach cover-up, translating Yeats into Italian.
When her peaceful beach-outing is disturbed by a large, rowdy family, led by the sheepish yet confrontational matriarch Nina (played by Dakota Johnson), we start to see glimpses of Leda’s troubles. Immediately, her stance and gaze changes. As she watches this young family, with a combination of nostalgia, regret and lust, we start seeing inklings into what exactly is driving Leda to lead such a solitary life.
Suddenly, the tone shifts and the Leda we’ve known changes, we see a flashback to a young Leda (played by Jessie Buckley) on the frantic search to find her daughter who wandered off on the beach, triggered by similar events on the beach in present day, when Nina’s daughter, Elena (played by Athena Martin), wanders off and a chaotic and emotional search-and-rescue takes place.
A small yet significant moment that I can’t seem to get out of my head, and this is the beauty of Colman’s acting in collaboration with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directing, is a quiet scene where Leda is laying in bed, solitary when a dying cicada jolts her out of peace on the pillow beside her.
As the film progresses, this cicada was a method of foreshadowing, representing the death of intimacy, of having a bed to one’s self with the memory of what used to be, remaining, even when the lover is lost to the past. The film is filled to the brim with these types of small, allegorical moments.
Remember the rotten fruit from earlier? Well this is the part where I bring that into context.
Upon many a flashback, we see the young Leda with her two daughters, Bianca and Martha, peeling an orange. The daughters chant “Don’t let it break. Peel it like a snake” as Leda runs the knife around the juicy rind of the fruit.
This moment exists in the past, representing what used to be her relationship with her daughters — the rotten fruit at the beginning of the movie acts as a reminder to Leda and a lesson to us that no matter how far you run from a memory, even if it’s all the way to Greece, the past has a way of coming back up.
Earlier in the movie, when Elena goes on her little escapade and causes panic, Leda steals the girl’s doll, which plays into the aforementioned symbolic richness of this movie. This young girl’s doll, for Leda, is a temptation to redo motherhood on her own terms, to fix the past mistakes of a young mother at the distressing intersection of love and rage — which reaches its climax when she throw’s her daughter Bianca’s doll out of an apartment window, where it shatters upon meeting the pavement below.
Well, without going into too many tangential lines, Leda and Nina develop a friendship that’s a guise to gain Nina’s trust, whose daughter is distraught and physically ill at the loss of her doll. As an act of good faith, Leda purchases a hat pin for Nina, to throw her off her trail that she is, in fact, the one who stole the doll from the beach.
Events progress, and as Leda is about to leave her apartment and Greece, she reveals to Nina that she was the culprit, and to no one’s surprise, Nina is not happy.
Actually, scratch that, she’s furious, and in an ultimate act of almost Shakespearean-like irony, Nina stabs Lena with the hat pin gifted to her. This is where the movie breaks, and it seems like the pseudo dream-like sequences that come before this moment are gone, and Leda is brought to the present, to a reality where she can make up for the mistakes of the past.
That’s really the pathos that this movie encapsulates: cycles will continue to repeat themselves until we learn our cosmic lessons, and if we don’t put that change into action, it can lead to devastating consequences.
