For her debut behind the camera, the American actress signs the subtle and disturbing adaptation of a novel by Elena Ferrante. The film has been available on Netflix since December 31.
“Exciting and dangerous.” Such were, according to the New Statesman, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first words following she closed Stolen doll, a novel by Elena Ferrante published in 2006 (translated by Gallimard in 2009). Quickly, the American actress decided to send, through her editor, a long letter to the Italian novelist whose true identity remains a secret. She had a presentiment of it: the book contained the material of a film just as disturbing and heady as the prose of Ferrante.
This film, The Lost Daughter, has been available on Netflix since December 31. It is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first feature film as a director and the first English adaptation of a novel by Elena Ferrante (her famous saga The prodigious friend has been the subject of a series shot in the Neapolitan dialect).
For The Atlantic, The Lost Daughter constitutes a tour de force, so much the language of Ferrante in Stolen doll seemed difficult to transpose to the screen. The words of its narrator, Leda, “Streams in cascades of feverish and dreamlike sentences, while in his mind follow at a frantic pace the puffs of memories, the wandering thoughts, the colorful reveries, the down-to-earth asides regarding his holidays”. The American magazine continues:
In order to translate all this, Gyllenhaal had to find his own visual vocabulary. ”
To do this, the filmmaker used two actresses who each play Leda at two points in her life. Olivia Colman (The Crown) lends her features to the almost fifty-something woman, a brilliant American professor of literature who came to spend part of the summer alone on a Greek island. As for Jessie Buckley, she resuscitates, in a series of flashbacks, the woman
[…]
Delphine Veaudor
