A Double Review of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter [La Figlia Oscura] (2006) and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021)
Best read after reading/watching!
Elena Ferrante’s third novel ‘La Figlia Oscura’ was published in Italian in 2006 and translated into English as ‘The Lost Daughter’ in 2008. It has recently come back into attention because of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s acclaimed English film adaptation recently nominated for three Academy awards and currently available on Netflix.
I offer a double review of ‘The Lost Daughter’ as I did for ‘The Power of the Dog’; first the book then the film in the order I experienced them. Interpretations across different mediums have always fascinated me with their different emphasis in their creation of their worlds for their reader or viewer. For many the book is always inherently better but while the source book is usually richer it is a different kind of thrill to see that text that exists in our imagination interpreted and actualised. The film isn’t always lesser, it just exists differently.
It is worth noting that Ferrante gave the rights to her book to Gyllenhaal directly with the sole provision that she direct it herself (despite no previous directing credits). She wrote in The Guardian of female artists being “inside the male cage for too long” and that; “It’s important for me – for her, for all women – that her work be hers and turn out well. Mine already exists, with its strengths and defects.”
My reading is that the book is a masterwork, perhaps not as favoured as Ferrante’s Neapolitan ‘My Brilliant Friend’ series, but one that has strengths only, without discernible defects. The film has its own strengths, many directly from the book but some shifted away, but it also has more defects.
The book
“ The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.” …p 10 (Text Publishing Company, 2015 ed.)
“Then suddenly it seemed to me I had done something mean, unintentional but mean..I felt like a drop that slides over a leaf after the rain, carried along by a clearly inevitable movement.” p 45
My first impression of this taut 140 page masterpiece was of a murder mystery where the perpetrator has no idea why she has committed their shocking act. The difference here is the theft of a child’s doll takes the place of a bloodied body, but both equally a crime.
Ferrante writes prose that is as precise and sharp as a blade used in a murder, which creates this foreboding sense of a horrifying crime. Essentially, the blade Ferrante writes with her is the same one her central character uses to peel fruit for her daughters; “ when I peel fruit I am finicky about making sure that the knife cuts without ever breaking the peel..maybe it’s my taste for ambitious and stubbornly precise work.” (pp 61-62)
The mystery as a snake peel
Ferrante’s writing peel in the set up and ensuing why of the central crime allows nothing superfluous, sentimental or moralistic to get in the way of the piercing ambivalence of her characters, especially her vacationing protagonist.
The peel is also a metaphor for the mystery of the crime and Leda trying to understand what she internally deems a “senseless act” that is like the drop of rain on a leaf carried by an inexorable movement. Ferrante gives the reader more clues as to why the doll was cruelly stolen but they too snake like the orange peel.
There are clues given in images from the natural world that make the reader feel more like they have witnessed a violent act: rotted fruit, a gorged cicada, a violent pinecone, sticky traces of resin, and black spittle inside the doll’s mouth. And even the doll itself is imbued with a dangerous erotic power.
Maternal ambivalence
The clues gather into a bigger picture back into the past of Leda as a young mother, and even further back into Leda’s childhood in Naples. Much has been made, and is made in Gyllenhaal’s film, about this story being primarily about maternal ambivalence and warfare. It does seem Ferrante is shattering the myth of the blissful, sacred mother and replacing it with struggle, abuse and neglect.
This maternal suffering reveals Leda’s second shocking act which is her 3 year abandonment of her daughters as small children. This is presented like another mystery with painful clues; how cruel the world is on women especially mothers, the lack of freedom or individuality in their assigned role, the deprioritisation of their own careers, and the husband’s lack of support. Ultimately these factors produce an ambivalence and Leda’s final explanation for her inexplicable act to Nina; “I am an unnatural mother.” (p 140)
Leda never really leaves Naples
As the book flashes back in Leda’s mind to the abandonment act it flashes back further to Leda’s own fraught childhood in Naples which she fled at the first available chance. In my mind, the rejection of her Neapolitan heritage and identity is the most compelling reason she steals the doll from the Neapolitan child in the present scenes.
At the fundamental base of Elena Ferrante’s work is a Neapolitan identity. Naples takes its place at the centre of Ferrante’s books even when it features only in brief flashbacks in Leda’s mind in ‘The Lost Daughter.’ It is the key to understanding why in the present Lena keeps the doll for days while its small owner is distraught, and only returns it when the damage done is irreparable. Leda is not only running from Naples but she is running from the Naples inside herself, and the Neapolitan characters reflect the internal identity she has tried so hard to murder and bury.
When these characters first invade Leda’s holiday tranquillity she pretends to be nonchalant, but remarks on how they are as a large family group and how they immediately take her back; “They were all related, parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, cousins, in-laws, and their laughter rang out noisily. They called each other by name with drawn-out cries, hurled exclamatory or conspiratorial comments, at times quarrelled: a large family group, similar to the one I had been part of when I was a girl, the same jokes, the same sentimentality, the same rages.” (p 18)
She also frequently notices their Neapolitan dialect and how gentle cadences are often replaced by indecipherable, vulgar, and even menacing sounds. While she stands up to them initially when the family ask her to move from her beach spot so all their extended members can be together, she is quickly entranced by the young mother (Nina), the daughter (Elena) and the doll (Nani).
When Leda spies Nina at the beach she recognises her as an "anomaly in the [family] group”(p 18), while Nina’s grasping daughter and her ever attached doll stir repulsion. Quickly she is gripped by complex, deep seated emotions from her Naples past she has been running from since she was 18. She is transported back into “the black deep well I came from.” (p 88)
In her mind she reveals how her own enmeshed Naples family held her tight even though she couldn’t stand them. As soon as she became a teenager she aspired to “ a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective” rejecting life forms that were “violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or..wretched degradation.” (p87) These Neapolitans are clearly still inside her.
Further, Leda’s responses to Nina, Elena and Nani motivate her to take the doll hostage but Ferrante makes the connections fluid and ambiguous. Nina appears to be the mother Leda was if she had stayed trapped in her enmeshed Neapolitan family. Elena likely represents the two daughters she left and their warfare against her. And Nani is the erotic charge between a child to a doll Leda can’t access and as a result who Leda cannot bear to give back because she needs her the most. Nani also represents Leda’s past pregnant belly whose black spittle represent the venom of the motherhood to come.
The mystery is never really solved
Ferrante gives so many hints in an allusive style (of reveals and hides) for the pivotal theft of the doll. She doesn’t allow any one answer to simply land on its own. Even when you think you have the scent, even after multiple readings, the truth is elusive. For example, I thought Leda’s main repulsion of the Naples inside her was simple classism, but the stifling hold of family is more likely to explain why Leda’s past is coming back to terrorise her.
That is a truly great writer. To be so sparse and yet so dense. For the cut to be so deep and yet precise. I approached the film unsure if its blade could be as sharp, but open to an interpreted visual representation.
The Film
“What, then, is a good film taken from a good book? It’s a film that picks up every impulse of the writing and finds a way of changing it into an image. The effort requires not faithfulness but invention and often betrayal. The goal is to get to the heart of the book, or at least the idea that the screenwriters and the directors have formed of it. If that is achieved, the most unfaithful film can turn out to be mysteriously close to the text.”(Elena Ferrante -The New Statesman. 8 December 2021)
Elena Ferrante in this quote was responding to a question about whether she felt Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film was faithful to her book in a way she found satisfying. Her answer was so characteristically brilliant I will use it to structure whether or not Gyllenhaal’s film is a successful adaptation and work of art in its own right.
Faithful?
Although it is in English and not Italian, it is a very faithful cinematic representation of Ferrante’s book. All of the main characters are there, albeit with different nationalities and some with more Anglicised names. The setting has changed from a beach in Southern Italy off the Ionian Coast to the Greek Islands. The plot unfolds in an almost identical way including the flashbacks (though the flashbacks don’t go further back into Leda’s own childhood.) Most of Ferrante’s thematic concerns are also there, with one crucial one missing (see betrayal section). Even most of Ferrante's metaphors are transplanted straight from the page to the screen.
Every impulse into an image? Invention, even betrayal
There are some beautiful invented images in the film. Gyllenhaal’s cinematographer Helene Louvant’s close ups when Olivia Colman’s Leda is first swimming don’t feature in the book, and in the first brief fragmented flashback memories of a younger Leda (Jessie Buckley) as a mother. The cinematic close up is significantly different to an author focusing closely on a person or object on the page. Later when the flashbacks become longer and more linear there is more development of the flashback characters. The later flashbacks play out as full scenes rather than the whirl of images in Leda’s head narrated to the reader as she is triggered in the present.
The best images in the film are not invented but were created by Ferrante, especially the orange snake peel which brilliantly captures the story’s main ideas particularly the attempt to understand Leda’s act. Gyllenhaal brings them to life visually and faithfully.
In terms of betrayal, the decision to make the film in English has meant that all of the fundamental Neapolitan references are exorcised. There is some attempt to make Leda from a place in England (Shipley) that is vaguely analogous to Naples, and the Neapolitan beach dwellers are now from Queens. But the changes almost entirely lose the book’s fundamental issues of familial and regional suffocation of the individual where Leda’s background allows the reader to begin to understand her theft. Audiences ignorant of the book probably won’t notice or miss such a change, but undoubtedly layers are lost especially in understanding character and the story’s mystery.
One interesting, bold change between book and film is in the way the mystery is revealed. There are no real clues that Leda is about to take the doll such as the abandoned doll sticking out of the sand image in the book while everyone is distracted searching for the doll’s owner. This is an interesting change that makes the reveal of the stolen doll in Leda’s bag more shocking, and more in the thriller genre.
Obviously the film is made in English to reach a wider audience largely for invested money reasons but also as Gyllenhaal said she partly made it for people who would never read Ferrante. But I wish like the extraordinary Italian series of ‘My Brilliant Friend’ it had been made as an Italian story by Italian filmmakers for the story for more depth and nuance to sit authentically inside an Italian and Neapolitan viewpoint.
There is a final betrayal of the book’s last line which is Leda responding to her daughters’ concerns; “I’m dead, but I’m fine” which is changed to “I’m alive actually”. Gyllenhaal has said both lines mean the same thing but do they? Ferrante communicates Leda’s psychological state more acutely while Gyllenhaal avoids ambiguity placating Hollywood audiences’ demand for a resolved ending. To make up your own mind I have included the last page of both book and script in my own afterword below.
Heart of the book?
Gyllenhaal clearly sees maternal ambivalence and the myth that motherhood comes naturally as the main heart of the story. She is very faithful to Ferrante here without inventing or augmenting much to the theme. The difference from Ferrante is she has two outstanding and consistent performances by Colman and Buckley (both Oscar nominated) playing the same character which makes the maternal horror and ambivalence emotionally powerful in the desperation of their faces of Leda across the ages. Dakota Johnson and Dagmara Dominczyk also embody struggling mothers and show how the stifling expectations placed on mothers are still as unforgiving and universal. They all depict a coherent picture close to the text.
Overall book or film? Which is the favourite daughter?
That brings my double review to this simplistic but inevitable question of whether the book or film is preferred: which is my favourite daughter?
Unsurprisingly I am in favour of Ferrante over Gyllenhaal on account of the greater resonance the Neapolitan characters and identity bring and how it forces her central character to confront a regional and familial past inside herself she has tried to bury.
To end, Ferrante herself gave her own largely laudatory assessment of Gyllenhaal’s work. If Ferrante is happy with the adaptation of her work onto a different medium then I certainly can be also;
Afterword/Epilogue
The last page of the book & the screenplay for your own comparative analysis.
