THE LOST DAUGHTER (2021)

Well received directing debut from actor Maggie Gyllenhaal plays like a literary conceit that never made it off the page.  From Italian literary sensation/mystery woman Elena Ferrante, the book may have been set a few decades back, carting trunk-loads of books to Greece on a ‘working’ vacation a pre-internet thing.*  But this merely the smallest item not to add up.  Olivia Colman is the chilly protagonist, withdrawn, reserved, with a blemished past that partially ‘explains’ her wary behavior; and so socially off-putting you never buy into her island encounters.  Would Ed Harris’s resort manager hang around waiting for an invitation?  Would that noisome Italian family (from Queens, yet) after a false start, wind up sharing personal confidences?  And would Colman share back?   The ignition point comes when a little girl from that loud Italian-American family goes missing at the beach.  Found by Colman, she’s brought right back.  But in the confusion, Colman takes her little doll.  Why?  Souvenir?  Talisman?  Reminder?  The more Colman becomes immersed in various interpersonal dramas (including a handsome beach attendant to ogle), the more she clings to the doll.  Tending it; hurting it; cleaning it; hurling it; rescuing it.  Psychologically it’s tied to her own past as sometime absent mother to her own two girls twenty years ago.  (Jessie Buckley disturbingly fine as a young Colman.)  Turns out, she’s got something of A DOLL’S HOUSE history to her. Or is it fixation?  It’s Ibsen meets Ferrante meets Michael Haneke.  Yikes!  Technically, Gyllenhaal favors uncomfortably close hand-held camera shots the way some actresses break personal space even when not on stage.  No doubt it’s meant to be off-putting . . . and it is!  Her other bold stylistic choice raises the color ‘temperature’ in the flashback scenes.  Then, once we start to know the score and fill in the past, the look is reversed with present day scenes getting the treatment.  A bit precious, then suddenly dropped.  Was it even intentional?  And since not a single person on the island seems able to pick up on the most obvious social cues Colman keeps dropping like cement bricks, why should an audience try to read stylistic tea leaves?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Another clue to this being set decades back comes with a movie show of THE LAST TIME I SAW PARIS, a 1954 Elizabeth Taylor clunker playing on this Greek island’s revival house.  (In 2021?  A Greek Island Movie Revival House?)  To Gyllenhaal’s credit, she turns this unlikely moment into a visual gag, posing Dakota Johnson, mom of the girl with the missing doll, to look like La Liz in the following scene.