La figlia oscura/The Lost Daughter

 

We all know childhood can be traumatic, but what about parenthood? Can living with our children leave lasting psychological scars?

This is one of the questions explored in La figlia oscura, a short novel by Italian author Elena Ferrante. The novel has been translated into English as The Lost Daughter, and adapted into a highly acclaimed film by Maggie Gyllenhaal, starring Olivia Colman. I’d like to talk about both the novel and the film here, with a particular focus on their depiction of motherhood.

La figlia oscura is the story of Leda, a lecturer in English literature at a university in Florence. Long divorced, she is adjusting to life on her own after her two twenty-something daughters have gone to live with their father in Canada. At first she feels liberated, and life becomes easier. She decides to rent an apartment in a seaside town for the summer, taking her work with her. Returning to the same beach every day, she becomes obsessed with a large Neapolitan family, whose noisy vulgarity recalls her own family of origin. The novel describes Leda’s activities and encounters during this holiday, but its focus is on her thoughts and memories, particularly of the period when her daughters were young and she was struggling to launch an academic career while looking after them. Most of the action takes place inside her mind.

How does the film cope with this challenge? First of all, it has to be mentioned that Gyllenhaal’s adaptation has one major weakness, an unfortunate side-effect of the Covid pandemic. The film script had initially transposed the action to the US, with the British-born protagonist working at an unnamed university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and taking a holiday on the nearby coast of Maine, where she meets a family from Queens, New York. So far, so plausible.

Since Covid restrictions made filming in Maine impossible, however, the entire production was shifted to a Greek island – while leaving the characters’ origins unchanged. So we have a British-born, US-based lecturer in Italian literature (specializing in Italian translations of English literature) taking an extended summer holiday on a random Greek island, where she meets a tough-as-nails family from Queens, New York. An altogether less convincing scenario, and one that eliminates the complex relationship between Leda's own origins and her response to the family she meets.

This problem aside, Gyllenhaal’s film is an excellent adaptation, which makes effective use of expressive acting, camerawork, dialogue and flashbacks (where a brilliant Jessie Buckley plays the younger Leda) to convey the protagonist’s inner life.

The initial scenes show her pleasure in her new-found freedom: driving to her destination with the car windows down and the radio blasting; immersing herself in the sea; stretching out on a sun-lounger with a cheeky Cornetto. As she nibbles her ice cream, the idyll is suddenly disrupted by the arrival of a large and vocal family group; Leda’s disappointment is palpable. Later, though, she notices a quiet spot amid the noise, the slender, dark-haired young mother Nina (played by Dakota Johnson) and her small daughter. In the novel, Leda observes the apparently perfect harmony between them and concludes that there is something special about the young woman’s way of being a mother: she seems to want nothing other than the child.

The film gets us right inside this mother-child interaction. As Nina and her daughter play aeroplane, the mother’s feet supporting the flying child, the camera takes us so close that we almost see the child from the mother’s perspective, feel her weight and warmth, hear her giggles. Leda, the observer, is visibly moved by these scenes: first smiling, then tearful, then agitated. As she walks to the beach bar and requests a glass of water to calm her nerves, we see the first fragment of memory begin to surface: the camera slides – for a second, if that – over a girl’s face with unruly braids and another girl’s bikini top and wavy hair. Then we’re back to Leda in the present, fighting to regain her composure.

This is followed by a longer scene from the past, a few seconds this time. Two girls, one on her mother’s lap, the other at her shoulder, watch with fascination as she peels an orange, making a single, long “snake” with the peel. Again, this is shot in extreme close up, showing the intimacy, the almost-merging of mother and daughters. Here, though, the mother’s attention is clearly divided. Music plays, slightly muting the childish chatter (“We should stick googly eyes on his face and put him in a cage and decorate the cage”); the mother laughingly agrees, but gazes over her child’s head into the distance. The scene perfectly juxtaposes physical closeness with mental remoteness.

As longer scenes from the past force their way into Leda’s consciousness, this juxtaposition become plainer. There are cuddles and gentle ministrations to the children’s physical needs – a fragment of memory from bath time, for example – but often the girls themselves are slightly out of focus, their talk muffled or drowned out by music. At one point the older Leda remarks sentimentally how soft small children are, “their little bodies”, yet her younger self, overwhelmed by her daughters’ needs and demands and desperate to focus on her work, is often oblivious to this loveliness. The film shows the duality of children – their beauty and unstinting physical affection, but also their power to cling, to make demands, to inspire rage and helplessness.

The difficult physicality of the relationship between mother and child is shown in another scene from Leda’s memory, faithfully reproduced in the film. In the novel Leda recalls how her own mother had resisted her desire for physical play, had not wanted to be combed, adorned with ribbons, dressed and undressed, treated as a doll. Having suffered from this unavailability of her mother’s body, Leda tried to be more available to her own first-born daughter, lying on the floor and letting the child give her medicine, brush her teeth, comb her hair. In the film we see the exhausted young mother dozing off in the middle of these games, only to be painfully woken when the comb, in the child’s inexpert hands, hurts her ear.

In a later scene, the young Leda refuses to give the physical comfort demanded of her: interrupted while trying to work, she puts a plaster on her crying child’s finger but ignores the request to kiss it better. The crying continues unabated, and the camera rests on Leda’s back, her tense posture showing how close she is to breaking point. In another display of deficient parenting, described in detail in the novel and enacted in the film, Leda loses her temper and shoves her daughter, who is defying her. “She was a child of three, but at that moment she seemed bigger and stronger than me.”

Leda’s greatest sin as a mother is withheld from the reader until she blurts it out accidentally, prompted by a desire to shock Nina’s smugly pregnant sister-in-law. When asked what her daughters were like as small children, she claims that she recalls very little. “I went away. I abandoned them when the older one was six and the second one was four.” Subsequently we learn that she left her family to pursue a sudden prospect of academic success and recognition, and an affair with a prestigious scholar. She returned and took back her daughters three years later.

The middle-aged Leda we encounter in the novel and the film is a woman whose mental health is crumbling as a suppressed trauma resurfaces. Some of this springs from guilt at her abandonment of her children, but much of it is a direct result of the experience of living with them. The film focuses on their early childhood, while the novel includes glimpses of what it was like to live with them as teenagers and young women, and touches on Leda’s present long-distance relationship with them.

The novel as a whole offers a fairly pessimistic view of parenthood. It suggests that the effort to do things better than one’s parents is doomed to failure; that the level of selflessness required to be a “good mother” is incompatible with any other kind of self-realization; and that it is almost impossible to make up for past mistakes and build better relationships with one’s adult children. Leda comments that she wrote a letter to her teenage daughters, trying to explain her actions and trigger a discussion. Her daughters, however, did not respond. Leda reflects bitterly: “What foolishness to think one could give an account of oneself to one’s children before they turn fifty at least. To expect to be seen by them as a person, and not as a function.”

The film ends on a slightly more optimistic note. Leda is last seen on a beach, sitting at the water’s edge, peeling an orange in a single long strip of peel, a ritual that had delighted her daughters in their childhood. Her daughters, previously somewhat uninterested in her well-being, call from Canada to check whether she is alive or dead, and she responds joyfully: “I’m alive!” Perhaps there’s hope that they can put their respective traumas – of childhood and parenthood – behind them, and move forward together. I like to think so.