Failing to Escape (Part 1)

The Lost Daughter (2021)

About a month ago, I watched the movie The Lost Daughter (2021), a film by Maggie Gyllenhaal based on the novel by Elena Ferrante. It’s about Leda Caruso, (Olivia Colman), a 48-year-old English professor of comparative literature who goes on a “working holiday” in Greece. She ends up getting wrapped up in the drama of an Italian family from Queens who are vacationing nearby, which sends Leda spiraling, powerfully reliving her own memories of early motherhood.

We watch as Leda grapples with her choices as a young mother, her inability to balance the demands on her body, career, and identity. Her desire to find a way out is palpable - to escape the exhaustion, to be able to detach from her role as a caregiver and to just be alone.

This movie sticks out for me because it’s so rare for a film to tackle the myth of motherhood so directly, and from a woman’s perspective. And by that I mean, the idea that motherhood, and the accompanying requirement of complete selflessness, will come naturally (and instantly) to all women.

In The Lost Daughter, there is no attempt to qualify Leda’s complex feelings about being a mother with the usual “but then I realized it was all worth it because being a mother gave my life meaning”. (Of course, being a mother gives your life meaning, but so does….you know, everything else about living.)

But the movie doesn’t blindly give her a pass either; we can sympathize with her to a point, but there are moments where Leda’s poor judgement is on full display that are almost hard to watch. She’s neither a hero or an anti-hero, she’s just a flawed human trying to figure her life out.

While Leda seems to express guilt about some of her life decisions, we don’t get the sense that she regrets having children. She very clearly loves her children and is still, in middle-age, finding her way to being the kind of mother she’s capable of being, with all her imperfections.

Over the years she has come to accept that her attempts to escape from her life to a new reality proved to be impossible. Because, for better or worse, all our experiences change us. You can never go back to a previous version of yourself, so maybe it’s better to just live with and accept your current self, as hard as that might be.

You can watch The Lost Daughter on Netflix, and it’s a nice companion to another film on Netflix that I will talk about next…stay tuned!