This piece includes spoilers for The Lost Daughter
It would be an understatement to say that Elena Ferrante readers have been eagerly awaiting the latest film adaptation of her work. Celebrated as an author reimagining feminine writing, Elena Ferrante is the pen name of an Italian writer whose true identity remains unknown. She defended her anonymity to her publisher when she first signed, saying she firmly believes “that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” And so, she gives interviews only over email and stays out of the media frenzy, not even appearing to accept prizes. Her books embody the death of the author in the truest sense: with their narratives freed from her identity, they hold universal relatability. If there is no face behind Ferrante’s novels, anyone who finds a home in her words could have written them. They are all of our stories. Even The Lost Daughter’s unapologetic critique of motherhood.
The Lost Daughter covers a welcome subgenre: conflicted, “unlikeable” mothers. At the story’s core is a dreadful landscape of maternal turmoil, a psychological shattering shared by the female characters. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film adaptation of the Ferrante novel of the same name debuted on Netflix in January, more than 15 years after the book’s initial release. The movie successfully adapted a literary plot to the screen, turning a story of interior unraveling into tense visual language with cuts to the past, close-ups on distraught faces, and interior monologue converted to dialogue. Most importantly, Gyllenhaal recognized and highlighted the subtle psychology of a little girl’s doll as central to two women coming to terms with their disgust of motherhood.
The film follows a university professor, Leda (Olivia Colman), who goes on vacation to Greece after her grown-up daughters have left the house. While on the beach, Leda becomes fascinated with a young mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), her daughter, Elena (Athena Martin), and the daughter’s doll. She watches as Elena cares for her doll like a mother, practicing her maternal instincts as she carries it on the shore, holds it in her arms, keeps it out of the sun, and gives it water. It is a depiction of effortless motherhood. The doll is doted on by Elena and Nina as though it were alive, achieving the status of a second daughter in their family.
Overcome by her obsession with the family, Leda steals the doll and cares for it in private: she wipes the marker off its legs, cleans water out from the inside, and even buys it new clothes. These actions insert Leda as a non-mother (her kids have grown up) raising a non-daughter (it is just a doll). Her care of the doll complicates the traditional understanding of maternity, where a woman must give birth to and raise a child to call it her own. The theft of the doll in The Lost Daughter shows us that we can find symbolic mothers in anyone who nurtures another. It is also the crucial event that brings to the surface Leda’s repressed memories of motherhood.
Leda undergoes an internal fragmentation as she cares for the doll, unearthing her own complicated history raising her daughters in bursts and flashbacks that tremble in the present. She remembers trying to nap as her daughter hit her with a hairbrush, throwing her childhood doll out the window after her daughter defaced it with marker, and slamming the bedroom door on her eldest daughter so a glass pane shattered. In the present, interposed between these scenes, Leda eats a salad on her balcony.
Elena, meanwhile, doesn’t get over her doll’s disappearance. She becomes needy for her mother’s attention, crying at the beach and clinging onto her, always desperate to be held. Leda watches and sympathizes with Nina, and they recognize each other’s fraught relationship to motherhood. “I’m really tired. I’m, like, scary tired,” Nina confesses to Leda when they are alone. “I remember,” Leda responds. In confessing their devastating exhaustion, they form a bond that brings deep relief and kinship. They have finally voiced the unspeakable: that they struggle with what they perceive as restrictive and imprisoning demands of motherhood. That they don’t love being mothers. Even if they love their daughters.
Then Leda confesses her ultimate maternal sin: “I left. When the oldest was seven and the youngest was five, I left. I abandoned them and I didn’t see them for three years.” She continues through soft sobs. “It felt amazing. It felt like I’d been trying not to explode and then I exploded.” And later, when Nina asks why she returned, she says simply, “I’m their mother. I went back ‘cause I missed them. I’m a very selfish person.” Leda, ultimately, isn’t interested in guiding Nina through her troubles, as she can offer no solution. She only knows she made each of her choices out of self-serving desperation.
Leda drowns in her fragmented history. Her confession makes it clear that she stole Elena’s doll to make amends for the three years she lost with her daughters. The doll allows her to practice feminine actions she could not pass on to her daughters, to atone for the crime of leaving them in order to pursue an affair and her academic ambitions. The doll is the perfect substitute for her daughters — it is, after all, what children use to facilitate their initiation into adulthood. Leda, a “failed” mother, uses the doll to demonstrate to herself that she is capable of maternal care.
The doll also reveals the repressed, repulsive aspect of motherhood, and in no moment is this more apparent than when Leda performs surgery on it. While Leda pumps the doll’s stomach, black bile leaks out of its mouth. The film cuts to her memory of the day she left her daughters: her husband begs on his knees for her to stay and the two girls ask her where she’s going as she closes the door behind her without looking back. Roberta Flack’s “I Told Jesus” plays over these memories. “I told Jesus, be alright if you change my name,” Flack sings even after we cut back to the present, connecting the memory to her present actions. Leda takes tweezers to the doll’s mouth and drops it, screaming. The music cuts and we watch from a birds-eye-view as a worm comes out of the mouth. It seems that Elena had “impregnated” the doll by putting a worm down its stomach.
The doll, then, has all this time not just been a surrogate daughter to Elena and Leda, but also a surrogate mother to the worm that it nurtured in its plastic body. As the worm crawls out of the doll’s mouth, Leda stares at this unexpected birth in shock. It gives birth like releasing an infection, black bile preceding and following the worm, which was not supposed to be inside it (a surprising kinship between Leda and the doll, both powerless to their motherhood). It is a physical affirmation that motherhood is, for Leda, disgusting. When at the end of the film Leda confesses to Nina that she took the doll, her only defense is, “I was just playing. I’m an unnatural mother.” Though she knew the theft would traumatize Elena, she wanted the doll for herself. She needed what only the doll could give her: a second chance at modeling her “proper” gender role.
She gives the doll back to Nina, who inserts her own object of choice into Leda’s stomach. She stabs her with a hat pin and tells her to watch her back. All the mothers are violated before the movie’s end: Leda by the pin, the doll by the worm, Elena and Nina by Leda’s betrayal. When Leda’s daughters call her at the end of the film, they tell her they thought she was dead. “Dead? No, I’m alive actually,” she says, smiling. She has returned from the deepest recesses of her mind and come to terms with her disgust of motherhood, with the fact that she will never truly get to redeem herself. What’s done is done. But with this acceptance, she is more alive than ever before. Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.
