'The Lost Daughter' on Netflix... Does anyone understand it? (*Spoilers)

[NinaDefoe]

Just finished it and I haven't got a clue what just happened!

What was the point of Paul Mescall's character?
What happened to her husband?
What happened to her daughter?
Was she talking to both daughters on the phone at the end?
What was the point of the 'gangster family'?
Why did she steal the doll?
Did she die at the beach?
What was the relevance of the female hiker she kept hugging?

So many questions.
Did anyone actually understand it? I don't think I could bear to watch it again.

Argh! I meant Paradiso (Dante) not Paradise Lost (Milton!)

But as I clearly can’t remember what I watched just last night, I may be inventing that …

LiterallyKnowsBest

Thank you! That all makes sense!

You are right, I can't stop thinking about it.
I looked for another thread but only found a ' should I/shouldn't I watch' one.
I'll take a look. Thanks for the link.

As well for me there was some thing about the innate loneliness of being a woman. Not sure I can articulate this well but I felt it deeply throughout the film - a woman with intense emotions, from singing in the car alone, to calling her daughter from her balcony excited at being on holiday and her daughter disinterested, to ordering champagne alone in her hotel room, to latching onto the female hiker, you felt as if she was constantly trying to connect with people but missing the mark and retreating lonely instead. The loneliness of mothering two small children, the juxtaposition of constant attention seeking and tugging and wanting to be left alone was wonderfully captured.

SFisnotsimple

You are so right. I did see that sense of loneliness.
The connection between her and her daughters is lost ? Has been for a long time - ever since they were small children when she was struggling to cope?

I thought the acting was good. I don’t think I completely understood the story. I think we were seeing things through Leda’s eyes, and she is a confused, unreliable narrator. So we are confused, stuck in her fog.

What struck me was she never expects to be a martyr, ever. And women are often expected to be. Not just for their children, but for strangers who want their spot on the beach. Leda is just like nope. And very indignant when the world expects her to be. She is a terrible mother. And a bit of a “Karen.” (Nickname for middle aged women who don’t expect to put up with shoddy treatment.). If a man wanted more “me” time or quiet in a movie theatre, it would be unremarkable.

I’ve been pondering that, just as the description ‘my brilliant friend’ actually applied to both of the main characters in that story, here Leda might herself be the ‘lost daughter’.

Her younger self was so vehement about not wanting her daughters taken back to the world of her own childhood - indicating how remorseless must have been her struggle to escape. And then there was the dinner conversation with the waiter - what was it she said about her beautiful mother? Maybe I’ll need to watch again - but I have an impression of conscious separation from her parent. She has been ‘lost’ herself - untethered - since whenever that became apparent.

Obsessed and uncomprehending here, cos there’s an awful lot going on.

I liked the different types of mothering that all the women displayed - from casual maternal contact and help to a new friend (hatpin fixing) to leaving the dd and memories of OC’s own mother.

I really like the female gaze throughout.

Did anyone else think the small girls could have been gently told to calm down when they were being demanding?

A gentle word could have saved a Gothic psychodrama - or is that me being awfully English.

@Supersimkin2

Did anyone else think the small girls could have been gently told to calm down when they were being demanding?

A gentle word could have saved a Gothic psychodrama - or is that me being awfully English.

I think it illustrates how even the smallest demands children place on you are hard to deal with when you feel out of your depth, overwhelmed or exhausted. A parent's anxiety feeds the child's anxiety and vice versa.

@Supersimkin2

Obsessed and uncomprehending here, cos there’s an awful lot going on.

I liked the different types of mothering that all the women displayed - from casual maternal contact and help to a new friend (hatpin fixing) to leaving the dd and memories of OC’s own mother.

I really like the female gaze throughout.

You're right~! I hadn't thought of that!

I think I need to re-watch it.

I thought it was fantastic. To me, it showed that everyone has a past, no-one is perfect, we've all done things we're ashamed of. Leda had buried the trauma and guilt from her past, but seeing Nina and her demanding daughter allowed her to watch from outside someone who was slowly dissolving under the pressure of being a lonely mother. It brought the pain and guilt back. It was fabulously done imo.

I loved it. I think the experiences at the beach led her to recall the intensity of the motherhood experience that she felt she had failed, alongside guilt at having left her girls for a while and the unexplained experience of temporarily losing a child. She empathised with Nina who was struggling to cope with one baby and in a difficult relationship with the father. Taking the doll was an impulse in response to this recollection of loss and a desire to experience motherhood in a way she had not felt at the time. Nina's fling with Will reminds her of the affair with the academic, the thrill of feeling a connection despite the inappropriate situation. I felt the events of this holiday allowed her to come to terms with her past. As she lay on the beach exhausted, she was able to take a call from her daughters and reconcile herself to the events of the past.

Thanks for everyone who has commented and tried to make sense of it for me! I think I should watch it again!

@NinaDefoe - thanks. Your answer made sense of many scenes for me 😀

I found it a really hard watch and was teary at the parts when she was utterly exasperated and trapped as a mother of young children.

It reminded me of The Hours, which again is a bloody hard film to watch.

I thought OC was incredible. I think this film will stay with me for a while.

@SFisnotsimple As well for me there was some thing about the innate loneliness of being a woman. You are spot on.

I found it a really uncomfortable watch but woke up this morning with the film in my thoughts. The character was at once completely connected to herself and completely not. So a constant internal conflict.

I think @LiterallyKnowsBest literally has a great potted summary upthread. Except maybe she was talking to both daughters at the end. I think she survived, but believe the book was different in some respects. If you know, don't tell me please, as I may read it!. I have started a thread in the tv topic, not knowing there was another 2 freds on it!

Glad you wrote SPOILER... because I want to mention the end...

So just in case....

SPOILER ALERT>>>>>

I thought it quite poetic that Nina stabs her in the belly button..it's like a severing of that umbilical cord. It's like Nina bursts a balloon and frees her from this old memory of being a tethered mother. I don't think she's mentally ill at all. It's just guilt and rage that she doesn't sit with expectations and why should she? The men around her are all doing what they please. But for her doing the same seems unforgivable. So she rages against it. She is quite inappropriate with Ed Harris and even Will, and shouts out against the entitled young men in the cinema

The men in the film are a brilliant foil. Ed Harris is a kindred spirit in some way. He says his children's mother raised his kids. Nobody is judging him... except himself perhaps. But OC needles him with her comment about his fatherhood and he replies with some sadness "well I taught them to swim".

In the flashbacks, OCs husband tells her that he's taking the kids to her mother's. And there's definitely a sense that her mother somehow was unable to provide the love and acceptance she needed.

The doll is so interesting. It contains this grossness that eventually crawls out. And then gradually OC cleanses the doll and mends it and dresses it all nicely. Another kind of letting go and fixing the past, with her own doll that was broken and lost.

She is the lost daughter but her daughters are also somewhat lost to her, or so she feels. Perhaps we are all lost daughters.
But it's like an exorcism I think and she's at peace in the end

I bluddy loved it.

Yes, @Mumteedum. She wasn't ill. The doll was her trying to fix things, as you say. In psychoanalytic terms apparently it's not unusual for people to re enact things from their past, to try to get it 'right' this time. The young woman, who was depressed and unhappy had no empathy for OC who had been nothing but kind to her, apart from the doll incident. I liked the way she took no prisoners at the cinema, and refused to move for the large group. She wasn't a people pleaser, as women are expected to be, but she stood her ground. Don't have to like her, I admired her though. As has been said/implied, her own DM probably wasn't much of a role model. It is very difficult to parent well when you haven't been parented well yourself

I loved this film.

I hadn't heard of it before watching it though, so was unaware of all the hype that I now see about it (but haven't yet read) so I had no expectations.

Just touching upon some of the comments here:

I didn't get the impression that she was mentally ill. I did feel that she was very socially clumsy sometimes - the way she quite firmly asked Lyle to leave her alone to finish her dinner, but then crept over, whispered something in Italian and then scurried off?! Or the conversation about breast size with Will?

I found a lot of the flashback scenes quite uncomfortable. The tiredness and the quick to anger possibly hinting at PND? I could see the spiral between the kids getting clingier the more she pulled away from them, but the clingier they got the more she just couldn't stand it. That was painful but it resonated a lot and both the acting and directing were superb.

At first I thought one of her kids had gone missing at the beach and died. Martha called her on her mobile but you only once saw the other ones (her name has gone right out my head) name/number on Ledas mobile screen. So she talked about them both a lot, but I suspected that the other one had died as a child and Leda was in some sort of denial in talking about her as an adult.

So it came as a surprise to me that she had actually just left them.

I don't know what to make of that. I think it's great to show something that men often do being done by a woman for once.

I don't know what I think of Leda. I do have a lot of sympathy for young Leda. You can clearly see the pressure she is under.

Older Leda, I'm not sure. I think she was invisible as a middle aged woman though. And I don't think she liked that. She was invisible when they expected her to move on the beach and invisible at the cinema, even when she kicked up a fuss.

When Nina asked why she went back to her kids and she said because she missed them then conceded that she is selfish. Ie she went back for her benefit, not theirs, I didn't have sympathy for her.

Such amazingly satisfying analysis on this thread … Mumteedum, ‘exorcism’ is a fantastic observation - yes, there’s something so ritualistic and mythical in her impulses / action.

I love the fact that I know I won’t get close to understanding the film until I’ve gone back to examine the literature whose translation she was researching in both the past (and the present?).

For now I’ve just downloaded the novel - so hopefully by tomorrow I’ll know whether Elena Ferrante was leaning on psychoanalysis or religion in her writing. But even just a few pages in I can see the adaptation makes for a much more artful and attractive narrative than the story as written.

Interestingly I did think she had died at the end, or was dying and hallucinating. The orange appeared in her hand. Her two daughters were together, phoning her on one phone - seemed unlikely to be real. The three of them started chatting and laughing together, a relaxed connection which had eluded her in life, and which was very different to her previous brief phone call with one daughter.

@HopelesslydevotedtoGu

Interestingly I did think she had died at the end, or was dying and hallucinating. The orange appeared in her hand. Her two daughters were together, phoning her on one phone - seemed unlikely to be real. The three of them started chatting and laughing together, a relaxed connection which had eluded her in life, and which was very different to her previous brief phone call with one daughter.

I hadn't thought that but now think you have a good point. Plus the weird dizzy/fainting spells were unexplained. Maybe she was dying all along.

Maybe she was dying all along.
This is what I think.

She struggled with walking, and had a very big reaction to the pine cone hitting her back. I expected that the illness would be explained, but it wasn't.