“The Lost Daughter” and the Gift of Maternal Attention

The film “The Lost Daughter” is not a pleasant experience but one that is true. The film adapted from the novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante is a poignant exploration of a mother’s dysfunction. The directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal offers an unapologetic view into the life an ordinary mother, flawed, wounded, and selfish as she is.

The story is by no means a condemnation, but neither is it an apologia. Through the dizzying array of feminine figures: Leda, Nina, Elena, Mina, the story explores the bond between a mother and child, sometimes exploring only through absence and longing.

The film is not fantasy; it is painfully, at times blisteringly, accurate. Given that it’s Netflix, there are horrifying moments when one thinks something graphic and untoward will unfold on the screen. There are those moments in the young Leda’s life, but the older Leda, the mother whose selfishness drove her away from the daughters who relied on her, is, as would be the case in real life, alone. The older Leda has only her work and her solitude, uninterrupted by the closeness of other people, keeping them awkwardly at bay.

The flashbacks to Leda’s young motherhood have moments of visceral misery that anyone who has cared for young children for any length of time can relate to. There are also piercingly beautiful vignettes of uncontrollable laughter, pretty dresses, children reciting poetry in a tongue they do not know. Leda in her young and old portraits carries the tension of a mother who longs to be with her children in those shimmering moments of mystery and at the same time cannot wait to escape them and get away.

Leda is so obviously wounded and sees herself as deficient, “not a natural mother,” as she says. Her failure is moral in its ramifications, but shame is not the answer. The answer is joy. Divided between her professional aspirations and the intensity of young children, Leda seems unable or unwilling to give her focus to her children. Here is where “The Lost Daughter” speaks the truth: women cannot have it all. To be deeply invested in work is to be drawn away from one’s children. That is not to say that mothers cannot have careers but rather to say that certain approaches to career are incompatible with the obligations of motherhood. To be perennially distracted with external ambitions is to resist the levity and beauty of daily life with children.

The hairy, self-satisfied pseudo-intellectual with whom the young Leda carries on a tryst at an academic conference, gets to the heart of the matter when he quotes Simone Weil, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” The professor speaks the line in praise of Leda’s work as a translator, perhaps a thinly veiled attempt at seduction if he had known that she were in the room. What it draws attention to are the people whom Leda distances herself from, the daughter lost to her in her selfishness and self-conceit.

“The Lost Daughter” is a worthwhile exploration of the maternal heart and the temptations that pull it from those who depend on a mother’s love as their lifeblood. So often, the discussions of women’s needs and aspirations leave out the people who depend on her, the people who without her will be lost.