The Lost Daughter: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Directorial Debut Explores Maternal Cruelty, Guilt, and Resolution

 

Psychoanalysis and Psychology of Film

The Lost Daughter: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Directorial Debut Explores Maternal Cruelty, Guilt, and Resolution

One of my favorite psychoanalysts, Thomas Ogden, in teaching us how to read other psychoanalysts, give us a single sentence of Donald Winnicott’s to read:

It seems to me that there is in it [the baby’s injuring his or her fingers or mouth by too vigorously sucking his thumb or hand] the element that something must suffer if the infant is to have pleasure: the object of primitive love suffers by being loved, apart from being hated.

In this sentence, Ogden tells us, there is sadness and beauty to the language, particularly in the words “the object of primitive love suffers by being loved.”  I have experienced the forcefulness, and even violence, of my children’s primitive love and their primitive love for me when they were infants – and even now that they are well into adulthood.  I, like most parents, have experienced sleep deprivation, agonizing worry and emotional fraying as a consequence of trying to meet their primitive love with love of my own.  But, as Winnicott is saying in this sentence (in accepting, but unsentimental voice), that is the nature of the beast – the nature of being the object of primitive love.

Winnicott uses the word object in this sentence not in its usual [psychoanalytic] technical sense (i.e. as synonym for a person in the external object world or a figure in the internal object world), but in its everyday sense (the object of the transitive verb love: the object of that kind of love.  More difficult for me to fully and genuinely acknowledge in reading and being read by Winnicott are the ways in which my own primitive love, both as a child and as an adult, has caused others – particularly my parents, my wife, and my children – to suffer.  And that, too, is inescapably the nature of the beast.

Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Ferrante’s Novel the Lost Daughter is a second meditation (in my mind) on Winnicott’s sentence, one that is wholly in line with Ogden’s interpretation (and experience) of it and my own, but with a bit of added vigorish – it is the experience of being the maternal object, one that is, I believe, deeper, richer, and much more complicated by biology and gender roles than the already complicated task of being the object of paternal love.  As if that weren’t adding enough complexity, it is about the relationship between mothers and daughters.

Having read just one Ferrante novel: The Lying Lives of Adults, I trust that Ferrante’s take on this complex relationship will have an added level of complexity – performing these gymnastics in the context of the Naples mob will up the ante even further.  But Gyllenhaal has written the screen play for American actors (and a Brit) – and then shifted the scene from the Jersey Shore to Greece because of COVID, creating a kludge of a backstory for the characters that somehow, weirdly, works, but certainly in a novel, American, way.

The film unfolds in the present, in Greece, and in flashback in the life of Leda (Olivia Colman in the present, and Jessie Buckley is the flashbacks).  In the present, Leda takes on Nina (Dakota Johnson) as her pseudo daughter.  In the flashbacks, she has two biological daughters, Bianca (aged 7) and Martha (aged 4).

I will tell the story in chronological order, not the order in the film, in order to orient you.  I think the story is told in flashbacks in order to disorient which heightens the experience, but vastly complicates the telling.  I admire Gyllenhaal for much in this film, including the complexity of the storytelling that keeps us off-balance but never loses coherence.

Leda, at about twenty, had her first child.  She was married to a decent enough guy, but their relationship, between the stress of raising two kids while trying to get his academic sounding career and her foray through graduate school going, became largely transactional.  Leda struggled to master Italian, write academic journal articles, and attend to the never ending demands of her daughters.  Leda goes to an academic conference, and one of the leading lights in her field, a handsome and brilliant scholar played by Peter Sarsgaard, recognizes her talent and she starts a torrid affair with him.  She leaves her husband and children, not for this man, but for freedom.  We are told that she returns to the children three years later, but we know the damage has been done.

Twenty years later, Leda takes a break from her job (she now lives in Cambridge and presumably teaches at Harvard) to stay in a ramshackle inn/bed and breakfast in Greece.  There, her solitude is disturbed by a boisterous, huge family of Greeks and Greek Americans who, the beach boy Will (Paul Mescal) tells us, is a bad family (we assume they are the Greek mafia).  She stands up to the boys in the family on multiple occasions, and while we admire her, we think she is foolhardy and vulnerable and we fear for her. 

Leda strikes up a relationship with Nina, a member of the Greek family who has a daughter, Elena, who is about the age Bianca and Martha were in the flashback, and Leda empathizes with, supports and undercuts Nina and her parenting of Elena all at the same time.  She also supports and undercuts Nina’s affair with the beach boy Will. 

The film ends where it begins, with Leda slumping to the sand with an apparent injury.  At the beginning of the film, I took it to be a gunshot wound and kept looking for Leda to piss the boys off enough to kill her.  But her “suicide by cop” is much more satisfying than this.  It is Nina who kills her.  Angry that Leda has stolen Elena’s doll – Nina stabs her with the hatpin that Leda lovingly provided to hold in place the floppy hat Nina’s husband had given her. 

Leda had just confessed that she is a terrible mother.  We know, and Nina can’t, that Leda has had a complicated relationship with the doll.  The doll was stolen when Elena’s daughter went missing because she was angry that Nina was not paying more attention to her.  Leda knew that it was Elena’s favorite doll.  Leda, who is no favorite of the family, finds Elena, much to everyone’s relief (they had feared Elena drowned). 

Elena’s disappearance parallels a period when Bianca had abandoned Leda because Leda was unavailable.  Leda tried to give Bianca the special doll from her childhood – she wanted to share with Bianca an attachment.  Bianca, furious with Leda, defaces the doll and, in a fit of rage, Leda destroys her own doll, tossing it out the window onto the street below.  Elena’s doll becomes a sort of substitute for the lost doll, but by taking it from Elena, she causes Nina the pain that she, Leda herself, felt with an inconsolable child.  Returning the doll at the moment she does, allows Nina to feel betrayed by Leda’s cruelty, just as Bianca did, but Nina is an adult and has the power to act on her fury.

I said the film ended the way it began, but of course it didn’t.  After Leda slumps to the ground, injured, she loses consciousness.  She wakes the next morning as the tide comes in.  An orange – an important means of connecting with Bianca and Martha – materializes in her hand and she calls her daughters and has the kind of warm phone call that mothers and daughters can have (but have not, to this point in the movie).  Leda may be dead.  Whether she is or not, there is a sense that having been liberated from her guilt, she is free to have the kind of exchange that she, and her daughters, could only have dreamed of.

It is easy, from the vantage point of the elder, so say that then, when we were young, and stepping into our relationship with our children would have meant so much to them and to us, that we should have done more of it.  That doesn’t address the intensity of the desire to step into the relationship with our work, or our adult relationships, and the impossibility, at moments, of doing both – or either – as single-mindedly and effectively as we might have.  If we don’t do this now, we feel, we will irreparably damage – what?  We imagine it is both our children and our careers or our loves or whatever else we are pursuing.  By having an affair, by quitting the job, by leaving the marriage to pursue the career, we imagine that we will escape the pressure.  Leda, and Winnicott and Ogden, suggest otherwise.  We cannot love, or be the object of love, without suffering. 

What we suffer is complex.  One part of it is guilt.  The movie would offer us the solace that being paid back in kind for our cruelty will expiate our guilt.  I think that gives the movie a nice wrap, but it doesn’t quite heed Leda’s experience and her words.  There is no cure for the suffering of love.

 

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