The Lost Daughter is Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut, and another notch in the belt of Olivia Colman's stellar acting credentials. A psychological drama and exploration of "unnatural" motherhood, the book-to-film adaptation follows professor Leda Caruso (Coleman) on vacation in Greece.
At the beach, a young woman named Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter Leda catch the attention. They develop a friendship, but Nina's overbearing family creates an air of menace.
As Leda observes the family, she is haunted by both present secrets and past experiences. Recurring memories of early motherhood open up the professor and make us question what happened between Leda and her daughters, now filling her with regret.
What was up with Nina's family?
Although The Lost Girl is primarily an exploration of Leda's psychology, Nina's extended family still plays an important role in the story. However, their motivation is unclear.
Nina's sister-in-law, Callie Calista, exudes an inauthentic maternal quality. When Leda helps the family by finding Nina's daughter, Callie is extremely kind to her. However, both Callie and Nina's husband Tony become enemies when they find Leda interested in Nina.
When Will warns Leda that they are "bad people," it becomes clear that the Calistas are not your average vacation family. That's about all the explanations we get, and I guess that's all we need. Callie and Tony's controlling nature over Nina, while not elaborated on, at least serves to push Nina and Leda's relationship a step further.
Is Bianca the lost daughter?
Much of the film leads you to believe that Bianca is the “lost daughter” referred to in the title. Leda's memories of early motherhood reinforce this. She has a strained relationship with her eldest daughter, even at a very young age. In one scene, an adult Marta calls Leda to assure her that they are still in a relationship.
However, we never see Bianca and Leda interact. In one scene, Leda's finger hovers over Bianca's contact information, as if calling her. But we feel fear holding him back. And Leda's confession that she abandoned her daughter for three years shows that the two are still separated.
It is possible that Leda and Bianca are still close. Then maybe Leda is the lost daughter. Her taking away of Elena's doll (so called a "mini midwife") can be directly paralleled by Leda's separation of herself from her daughters.
But whether the lost daughter is Bianca or Leda depends on how you read the final scene of the film.
How does "Lost Girl" end? Is Leda dying?
Given that this is a rich, complex film where the ending is open to interpretation - there are several possibilities for how Lost Girl will end.
After Leda confesses to Nina that she took her daughter's doll, Nina lashes out. He stabs Leda with a hatpin and storms out.
Leda then packs up to leave. He drives away at night. He hits the car, then falls, stumbling toward the ocean. When she sits down and calls her daughter, Bianca, things get messy.
Bianca and Marta answer him on the phone. While Leda is talking to them, an orange mysteriously appears in her hand. As he reassures his worried daughters that he is fine, he begins to cut the orange into a long slice, as he had done earlier with Bianca and Martha.
A straight reading of the scene suggests that Bianca and Leda are not separated. That the girl's mother is worried about her safety. Every difficult moment between mother and child was in the past, in Leda's head.
Alternatively, Leda could have died in a car accident never having reconciled with her eldest daughter. That would explain the appearance of the orange and the sudden, easy communication with Bianca.
Personally, I believe she died in the end—free at last from the strict expectations of the world and free to enjoy the finer, sweeter aspects of motherhood: the kind of motherhood she had never been able to grasp in life.
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