Why You Need To Watch "The Lost Daughter"

After reading the novel “The Lost Daughter,” the acclaimed actress Maggie Gyllenhaal (and sister to stud, Jake), became obsessed with the idea of adapting the story for screen. 

But she had two giant obstacles in her way. 

Even though she’d spent most of her life in front of the camera, she'd never written a screenplay before, and wasn’t sure she’d be any good at it.

But that wasn’t the biggest block. She first had to convince Elena Ferrante, the mysteriously anonymous Italian author to trust her with the story. 

Gyllenhaal had only one shot to write the perfect letter. She spent weeks editing and tweaking it to make her plea as honest and vulnerable as humanly possible. And it worked. Ferrante granted her the rights to the story, but under two conditions:

1. Gyllenhaal could have the screen rights, as long as she directed the movie herself. If she passed it to someone else, the contract would be null and void, forcing Gyllenhaal to quickly overcome her imposter syndrome and make a movie. 

2. Gyllenhaal had to portray the main character, Leda, as sane. Even though Leda's behaviors dance along the edges of sanity, Ferrante didn’t want the character to tip into "crazy lady" territory. 
   
   

I love that Ferrante made these two conditions explicit because A) She helped a women step into her light and B) She made it really hard for the viewer to judge Leda, which, in my opinion, is what makes the movie so brilliant.  

 

If you haven’t seen the Oscar-nominated movie, "The Lost Daughter" is about Leda, a 48-year-old professor played brilliantly by Olivia Colman, who’s relaxing Greek island holiday is interrupted and reshaped by a wild, obnoxious, fascinating family from Queens, New York.

The bizarre and uncomfortable interactions between Leda and the family prompt a steady flow of flashbacks to Leda’s early years as a young mother. 

Without spoiling the film for you, these flashbacks flesh out a portrait of a woman with some heavy-ass baggage. As a viewer, we desperately want to judge her baggage, to create space between us and her, but Gyllenhaal won’t let us do that. 

There’s just something about Leda, her imperfections, her realness, her roller-coaster range of emotions, that is endearing. We can relate. I did relate! 


Led's not a bad person, even though she does some truly odd and cringeworthy things that "good moms" on screens just don't do. And the fact that it’s hard to judge her, to label her as “crazy" forces us to acknowledge shadow parts of ourselves that she reflects at us. 

“I hope the movie is compassionate about how complicated being alive is,” explains Gyllenhaal in one of the million interviews I’ve devoured since seeing the film. “I was really trying to open the spectrum of acceptable feelings, and that has been really helpful to me, to allow myself to see in myself all sorts of complicated feelings and not indict myself for them.” 

As a coach I’ve realized that the #1 issue my clients struggle with is self-compassion. We are our harshest critics, no doubt about it. 

And for me this film is a beautiful and powerful reminder that one door to self-compassion is the softening stance towards others. 

Go see this film and let me know what comes up.