It’s refreshing that the film of Elena Ferrante’s novel, The Lost Daughter, accepts the complexity of child rearing
There’s a moment in The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel which stars Olivia Colman, where I gasped out loud and swore at the character. Colman’s Leda, a professor holidaying in Greece alone, is conversing awkwardly with a pregnant stranger. “Children are a crushing responsibility,” she says, by way of a conversational coda. The bluntness of Colman’s delivery meant that I was laughing as I gasped, but still: everyone knows it to be on some level true, but you don’t go around saying such things to pregnant women. Or at least, you shouldn’t.
The Netflix film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the 2006 novel; it holds the same capacity to shock while bringing out new feelings and elucidations. The moment in the film where one of Leda’s daughters cuts her finger and repeatedly begs her mother – a younger Leda, played by Jessie Buckley – to kiss it better, is far more emotionally affecting than when described in the slim, interior novel. “Poor creatures who came out of my belly,” Leda narrates in the book, and as a cinematic audience at times we are inclined to agree with her. Because what sort of mother abandons her children, as Leda does?
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
