For a few minutes you believe in a harmless summer film. The light is glistening over the bay. Behind it a pine forest in lush green. Leda floats on her back in the sea. At the start of the season, she has the beach and the waves to herself. She has a smile on her face; at first it is timid and hardly recognizable, as if only her chin had shifted slightly; then it forms into something confident.
It could all be perfect, but of course it isn’t. Because soon it begins to glow ominously under the surface. Something is wrong with this sensual, humid vacation spot. As if from a premonition, the nicely draped fruit in a bowl is attacked by mold from below. And at night a huge, alarmingly loud cicada suddenly lies on the pillow next to Leda.
Olivia Colman plays Leda Caruso, a divorced woman in her late forties, mother of two grown daughters and professor of Italian literature, who has rented a holiday apartment on a small Greek island. Although she brought work with her on vacation, she still wants to relax. She cheerfully flirts with the good-looking student Will (Paul Mescal) who earns extra money with a job at the beach bar, as well as with the older Lyle (Ed Harris), the caretaker.
The holiday idyll ends abruptly with the arrival of an extended Greek-American family from Queens who move into a villa on the coast. A noisy and vulgar group of aunts, uncles, cousins and cousins, from whom – as Will suggests – one should rather stay away. Leda particularly catches the eye of the attractive Nina (Dakota Jones), who is playing with her little daughter on the beach. Leda recognizes the occasional discomfort of the young woman in her mother role. She begins to observe Nina, which reveals her own painful memories of being a mother: a complex mixture of love, shame and the feeling of getting lost in the norms of society.
“Woman in the Dark” is the directorial debut of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. Her screenplay, which won a film award in Venice, is an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel of the same name (In the Italian original, “La figlia oscura”, Leda is Italian, English professor in Florence and is on vacation on the Calabrian coast). The writer, who became famous with the series of novels “My ingenious girlfriend”, gave Gyllenhaal the film rights only on condition that she would direct the film herself.
Ferrante writes about relationships that remain strangely vague
Not an easy undertaking: Ferrante’s writing is an art of nuances, unspoken hints and strangely illegible relationships. At the beginning of her novel there is a sentence that sums up her literary search: “The things that we do not understand ourselves are the most difficult to explain.” From this material Gyllenhaal has made an elegant, sensitive drama from and about female perspectives. Her film jumps back and forth between two levels of time (Jessie Buckley plays the young Leda in flashbacks) and gradually condenses in the midst of the hypnotizing, chirping island nature into the psychogram of a woman who is desperate about the roles she has been assigned.
Basically, Ferrante and Gyllenhaal go well together: their work is both about a feminine gaze. In this film, the men remain marginal characters who advance the plot as flirtation or as a latent threat. Leda is always at the center. With Hélène Louvart (“Never, Seldom, Sometimes Always”) Gyllenhaal has found a camerawoman who finds intense images for them and is always very close to Olivia Colman, who bears the weight of the story with her brilliant portrayal. It is her face on which the viewer can read the full artistry of Ferrante’s writing: the ambivalences of the main character, her tension and inner disruption.
Leda is an antihero, an uncomfortable and opaque figure, difficult to grasp in her changeable moods and impulses. Sometimes she is cool and controlled, then angry and clumsy, caring one moment and almost witch-like spiteful the next. During a movie screening, she loudly messes with a group of local teenagers. Or she harshly rejects Lyle’s attempt at flirting in a pub, only to whisper a clumsy pick-up line into his ear a moment later.
As self-confident as Leda appears, she doesn’t seem to know what she wants. Sometimes she seems to be a child herself. When Nina’s daughter disappears on the beach, she helps with the search and finally finds her. She brings the little one back, but keeps her favorite doll out of a mysterious affect. A very special little drama develops around the doll – a central motif in Elena Ferrante’s novels – in which Leda’s ambivalent experience of motherhood is reflected. It is especially exciting to look at because Gyllenhaal lets us look at her female figure as relentlessly as Ferrante does in her books.
The Lost Daughter, USA 2021 – Directed and written by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on “La figlia oscura” by Elena Ferrante. Camera: Hélène Louvart. Editor: Affonso Gonçalves. Starring: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, Paul Mescal, Peter Sarsgaard. Netflix, 121 minutes. In the cinema. Streaming start: December 31 2021