Review - The Lost Daughter - Abandonment issues
Elena Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Quartet – an epic tale of female friendship and rivalry told over six decades – is easily her most famous work. By the time the final volume had been published in English in 2015, the quartet had become an international bestseller, sparking what we now know as “Ferrante Fever”. However, it was her first three novels, Ferrante has suggested, that allowed her the “creative space” to write the quartet. She sees them as “part of a chain” that deal with similar themes and concerns.
This should give Ferrante fans, as
well as those discovering her work, more reason to watch The Lost
Daughter, a film version of the last of those formative three novels,
due for release in January. Adapted and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film
features a star-studded female cast, including Jessie Buckley, Olivia Colman
and Dakota Johnson. Ferrante has taken a hands-off approach to the adaptation,
in keeping with the fact that she has famously kept her true identity hidden.
In a letter to her publisher in 2016, affirming this stance, she wrote: “I
believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If
they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not,
they won’t.”
However, she did make one crucial intervention. When Gyllenhaal, a seasoned actor, wrote to Ferrante asking for permission to adapt The Lost Daughter, the author agreed, but on one intriguing condition: Gyllenhaal had to direct it herself or the contract was “null and void”.
Mothers and daughters are a recurrent
theme in Ferrante’s work and none more so than The Lost Daughter (originally
published in 2006 as La figlia oscura), a book about a woman who
abandons her children. In Gyllenhaal’s compelling adaptation, the protagonist,
Leda Caruso (Colman), a professor of literature and a specialist in Italian
translation, is on holiday alone on a Greek island. Leda is divorced; her
grown-up daughters live with their father. On the beach she encounters a large,
loud and uncouth American family. Leda becomes fascinated with one family
member, Nina (Johnson), a beautiful young woman, and her daughter Elena (Athena
Martin).
The book and film follow similar
trajectories. Leda envies Nina’s close relationship with her daughter and her
apparent maternal serenity. The child reflects her mother’s love in her
attachment to her doll, named Nani, “from whom the child was never parted and
to whom Nina paid attention as if she were alive, a second daughter”. But then
Elena goes missing on the beach and there is uproar. Leda recalls her own panic
when one of her own daughters was lost, but reassures Nina, “She’s wearing your
hat… She’ll be found, we’ll see her easily.” Leda is applauded when she finds
the girl. However, as we soon discover, she has stolen Elena’s abandoned doll:
a senseless, some would say cruel, act that even Leda doesn’t truly comprehend.
As she comments at the beginning of the novel: “The hardest things to talk
about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.”
Of the book, Gyllenhaal commented at
the New Yorker Festival in 2018: “I have never heard these things articulated
before. There was one point where I was like, this woman is so fucked up, and
then I was like, I totally relate to her.” In an interview with the New
York Times in 2014, Ferrante refers to it as “the most daring, the
most risk-taking” of all her early novels, with themes that troubled her the
most, claiming: “If I hadn’t gone through that, with great anxiety, I wouldn’t
have written My Brilliant Friend [the first volume of her
Neapolitan quartet].” A year later, she told the Flemish paper De
Standaard: “It cost me a lot to write… [and] left me feeling the way you do
when you swim until you’re exhausted and then you realise you’ve gone too far
from the shore.”
It’s easy to see Ferrante’s first two
novels as part of a chain leading to the third. In her debut, L’amore
molesto (1992), translated into English as Troubling Love in
2006, Delia is obsessed with her mother Amalia’s beauty. After learning that
she has drowned, Delia travels home to Naples for the funeral and attempts to
piece together the details surrounding her mysterious death. In doing so she is
forced to confront her own troubling childhood memories. In I giorni
dell’abbandono (2002), translated as Days of Abandonment in
2005 and made into a film the same year by Roberto Faenza, Olga has a breakdown
after her husband leaves her for a younger woman. She neglects her children,
but her young daughter’s presence helps bring her back from the brink.
The Lost Daughter also points to the quartet to come. For Leda, it is a lost doll that precipitates her emotional crisis. A similar motif occurs in My Brilliant Friend – at the start of the novel, childhood friends Lila and Lenù throw each other’s dolls into the cellar of an apartment owned by Don Achille Carracci, “the ogre of fairy tales”. Ferrante went on to write a children’s novel, La spiaggia di notte (The Beach at Night), narrated by the doll from The Lost Daughter.
Much of the drama in the book and
film comes from the question of whether Leda will keep the doll or give it
back. The child, Elena, is distraught by the loss, but instead of returning the
doll, Leda buys it new clothes from the local toy shop. Her transgression
provokes recollections of her own childhood doll, Mina, that she had given to
her eldest daughter. This leads to a deluge of memories where we learn Leda
abandoned her children so she could pursue academic success and a passionate
love affair with the charismatic Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard). In the
novel, Leda recalls all her bad mothering moments – when she had shouted at her
children, slammed a door shut on one of them, or thrown the doll out of the
window. Gyllenhaal is kinder and shows young Leda (Buckley) in a series of
flashbacks as a loving mother, genuinely torn between her work and her
children.
In a 2007 interview with the Italian
press, Ferrante claims that Leda “sought an emancipation and confrontation on
equal terms with the male world”. She had wanted both children and a career.
Gyllenhaal’s adaptation explores this decision with understanding and grace.
Ferrante’s novel is darker – accenting a mean, selfish streak in Leda followed
by a crushing guilt that haunts her. One can convey a character’s emotional
scars, their hidden thoughts, what Ferrante has called their “fragmentation”,
more easily in a novel than a film. Perhaps inevitably, then, both
Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter and Faenza’s Days of
Abandonment soften the darkness at the heart of the novels, along with
the obsessive nature and intensity of the female protagonists, making the
characters more sympathetic for a film audience.
The apparent ease with which
Gyllenhaal has adapted the novel for a mainstream audience is an indication of
the authenticity of Ferrante’s text – something she always strives for. One of
the reasons her fiction translates so well onto screen is because she shows,
rather than tells, difficult emotions. Part of the pleasure of The Lost
Daughter, in both forms, is the honesty with which the female protagonist
is drawn and, in the film, the beauty with which Colman conveys it: a nuanced
portrait of a middle-aged woman – flawed, prickly, sympathetic. As Ferrante
observed in a Vanity Fair interview in 2015: “Honest writing
forces itself to find words for those parts of our experience that are hidden
and silent.” It is this ability to express the complexity of women’s feelings –
as children, mothers and friends – how they function in a patriarchal society
and cope with obstacles including isolation and abandonment, that gives
Ferrante’s work its enduring appeal. Gyllenhaal’s film is a bold, textured
exploration of motherhood with a refreshing lack of sentimentality that will
undoubtedly win Ferrante new fans.
Originally published by New Humanist