The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal)

A Regretful Observer

Amir Siadat

The geography depicted by Maggie Gyllenhaal is familiar to me. I think Bergman Island must be such a place. This geography allows me to imagine, for example, that Leda is the same Monika who, two decades after that “summer”, is washed-out and depressed in her middle age. Or she’s that Charlotte, who after that painful and irritating meeting with her daughters, has come to be alone and review (or perhaps bury) her past and compose another sonata. In any case, she is one of those women whose rebellious and restless spirit can’t be simply included in the image of a mother. They still want to work and create and be active, continue to love and be loved and step into forbidden paths. This geography even has a trace of The Hours, not only because of the time going back and forth or because of the portraits of several women, but mostly because of the presence of Ed Harris. I feel like he has come straight from Stephen Daldry’s film to give the address of that “forbidden path”! From this point of view, it’s understandable why The Lost Daughter has also been called the female version of Death in Venice. Probably, the complicated and mysterious situation of the main character of the film, who is a lonely traveler of a coastal area and a regretful “observer”, has more than anything provoked such an impression. This hypothesis becomes interesting to me when I interpret the opening and closing scenes of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film in the light of Visconti’s film. Didn’t the story of Leda in The Lost Daughter end up on the beach like Gustav in Death in Venice? And isn’t that mother-daughter phone conversation a wish fulfillment on the verge of an eternal departure? If so, shouldn’t we doubt the rest of the film’s data until the final moment and ask ourselves is it possible that Leda has returned home three years after leaving her daughters? What do Olivia Colman’s eyes reveal? The pangs of conscience for a three-year slip, or hatred, jealousy and envy, as a price for an irreversible path?