The Lost Daughter and Hopes I Absolutely Had for 2022 That Have Not Come True
[Note: I wrote this as the clock struck midnight on the end of 2021 and I moved into 2022. I previously published this on an older, different blog. But Medium’s redesign has me back on its bullshit. I will keep writing, even if not as much as I’d originally hoped.]
As 2021 cruises into hindsight, into oh-so-magical regret and clarity, it once again becomes my goal for the upcoming year — as it did one, two, three years ago — to just write more. Weekly, daily, whatever, I don’t give a fuck. I hate writing, but it is the only thing getting me out of bed in the morning. No choice when it’s that kind of a pain in the ass, right?
My plan is to write more briefly, to chase out whatever neuroses arise within my response to a story or a feeling. Films, their stories and their feelings, might be the only thing I’m able to sufficiently analyze. I’m insecure about it! I need to bypass the trepidation which stems from hardly writing, which stems from my choice to write only when inspiration strikes, and instead build consistent (if more frequently miserable) sessions. Maybe, by May I’ll have the gall to finish a short story. It’s ambitious, I know. New years are a process, especially as each subsequent year worsens inevitably and leaves behind a compulsory taste of cynicism. But writing’s a process too.
And so what better way to end the year than with The Lost Daughter? Maggie Gyllenhaal has here crafted a film with some of the worst vibes in my recent memory. And, for better and for worse, she knows it.
Olivia Colman’s character is Leda Caruso, an academic on holiday in Greece who, in lieu of her notes and her books, watches aggressively, though from a distance, the family who interrupted her beachside retreat. Will, a beach attendant from Dublin played by Paul Mescal (setting my heart and the screen alight in his scenes with Colman), tells Leda that although he admired her refusal to move away from her spot on the beach so as to get out of the way of this family, he advises that she should not be so inimical again.
Why, she asks.
“Because they’re bad people,” Will says.
Dakota Johnson’s and Dagmara Domińczyk’s characters (Karolina on Succession; thrilled to see her finally get some lines to chew on) are each charming as members of the cavalier Greek-American family Leda encounters on the beach. But once Will confirms what I and surely others suspected, that these visitors from Queens do not take kindly to adversity, the psychological thriller buried layers deep inside Gyllenhaal’s debut takes off. Bad vibes taste like a bowl of moldy fruit positioned in the center of Leda’s apartment, mere steps from what I can only assume is the Mediterranean; bad vibes sound like whatever the hell the insect is that wakes Leda from a patchy night’s sleep. She flings the bug off her pillow and out the window but it leaves its mark. There’s plenty beautiful to see in The Lost Daughter: Olivia Colman’s and Jessie Buckley’s faces (playing the same character in separate timelines), Dakota Johnson’s eyes, Paul Mescal’s shorts, the craggy beaches and pink villas. And while the moldy fruit and the buzzy bug should inform Leda that this excursion will be anything but undisturbed, the core of this film, its absolute worst vibes, emerge late. A hair pin becomes a shiv at the drop of a hat; a worm, perhaps a very small snake, emerges from the mouth of a child’s doll. And yet that moment, towards the end of the film, comes nowhere close to putting me off like the behavior we see in flashbacks from Leda’s daughter.
The Lost Daughter is an excellent film with horrible vibes and it flies the banner for why, if you ever want to read a single book ever again (especially if you’re a woman), you should not have kids. The film questions — like a child — the assumption that parents have all the answers. The effectiveness of Gyllenhaal’s claustrophobic, interior direction expresses the desperation that many mothers must feel: when will this child realize I don’t know everything, that I cannot do everything and certainly not all at once? It’s a space a male filmmaker cannot navigate. But Gyllenhaal has the craft of a far more experienced director, even for actors who have spent decades working with veteran master directors. Her depiction of suffocation that mothers, young and old alike, suffer is vivid and empathetic: the scene where Jessie Buckley’s younger Leda flees her husband and two daughters is breathtakingly anxious, but Gyllenhaal shows Leda’s breaking point with enough vigor that it’s impossible to not breathe a sigh of relief for Leda. The Lost Daughter never lets its audience breathe, even when it winks toward hope at the very end. I wish we had more new films that were like it. It’s an ideal film on which to end this absolute trash bin of a year. I wish I could be more hopeful that 2022 will be any better, but with luck I’ll keep my mold on the right side of the bowl.
▨
“And there she was: one of the less deceived. Stood in a corner, smoking, inside. She was very small and very old. She gave me a cigarette without comment and only when I reached the balcony did an excited young American writer explain to me who she was. At that point in my life, I knew very little about authors, about their mythologies or their biographies, or even what they looked like. I only knew their sentences. I considered rushing back into the room to say a lot of highly emotional things very quickly to the great American writer Joan Didion — from whom I had learned so much, who had meant such a great deal to me, personally — but, remembering her sentences, decided against it.” — Zadie Smith on Joan Didion
“Nostalgia isn’t enough and it wouldn’t have saved West Side Story were it bad. But it’s not. It’s the greatest American film of the year and against all odds it had stiff competition. Your memories aren’t any kind of shelter from a present going to dark places. Good art can be.” — Scout Tafoya on West Side Story
“To put it another way, while everyone else drank the Kool-Aid, she stuck to Coca-Cola and cigarettes.” — Same article as the first one. You should click that link and go read Zadie Smith on Joan Didion.
