To ask for someone to explain The Lost daughter to me?*spoiler in opening post*

[Ridelikethewindypops]

I've just watched this last night and it's been playing on my mind all day.
Olivia Coleman was riveting, I was just so tense all the way through. But I'm not sure I fully got it??
Was it basically about " unnatural" mothers?
Or how all mothering is basically unnatural?
Or just about a middle aged lady on holidays?
I sympathised hugely with her character, even though she was mean ( self described) and incredibly selfish.
And spoiler alert did she die on the beach at the end??
Leda just reminded me uncomfortablly of my own mother and a little of myself too.
I wondered was I supposed to hate her or feel such sympathy for her....

Sorry I gave up halfway through - this is the film with all the staring in isn't it? You deserve a medal for watching it all.

@TurtleTriplets 😅
Yes a fair bit of moody staring, and lingering close ups of Olivia Coleman's face. I found myself admiring her lovely skin.

I watched it and also read the book because I love anything by Elena Ferrante, but I'm not sure I can explain this at all as it is very odd. The morality in it is ambiguous, the main character enigmatic and the ending unclear. I prefer to think she doesn't die... In the original book I seem to remember it was all in Italy on the Amalfi coast and the other family were sort of a criminal type family from Naples. That part then made more sense somehow.

I thought it was about struggling to be a mother and have an identity of your own. That mothers are expected to give up themselves as a sexual person as well.

I found it very powerful and unsettling. I think she is a 'bad' mother by society's standards because she abandoned her children, but also I couldn't blame her for feeling suffocated. I didn't think she died at the end - but that this was a wound caused by revealing herself to the other mother, revealing the unthinkable side of motherhood maybe.

It was a while ago and I may be talking crap.

I must read the book. I found Leda fascinating and yes, rather unsettling.
She was very flawed but incredibly self aware and made very little attempt to hide it from people. The part where she was congratulating the lady on the beach on her pregnancy, and said children are such a " crushing responsibility" gave me the shivers.
I suppose that was the ambiguity also, because that is the truth, but mothers in particular are just expected to get on with it. Whereas the fathers Leda meets flit in and out of their childrens' lives with no consequences.

Yes, the "crushing responsibility" comment was incredible. Absolutely true, too.

The weird doll thing was so odd, wasn't it? I couldn't make it fit into the narrative at all.

I wasn't sure why she took the doll either. At first I thought she was planning to " find" it again to bring herself closer to the family. Then I thought maybe she was trying to replace her own childhood doll which her daughter drew on and she then threw away in a rage.
Perhaps she was behaving in a selfish child like way, and took the doll simply because she wanted to play with it?
I also wondered if Leda herself was actually intended as the "lost daughter" of the title?

Maybe that was obvious to everyone else 😄
As I said, I found this movie quite challenging!

When I watched the film I had a completely different idea - but then didn't see it anywhere else so may be wrong.
In the flashback scene when Leda was young on the beach with her own little daughters, one got lost and Leda was running around crying out her name. And when she finally found her there was one very brief moment of that girl lying on the ground face down. Somehow I was certain that something terrible had happened to the child and she had died.
Since then, whenever the older Leda spoke to her adult daughter, it was always the other one. Never the one whom she lost back then on the beach.
And only in the end, when Leda either died or not and then woke up, she was again talking on the phone but that time it was with that"lost daughter" (she said her name). So I thought that maybe Leda did die and that's how she finally got to talk in the end to her dead daughter.

@OnTheRoll That was what I thought as I was watching, that Bianca had died. And that Leda was a sort of unreliable narrator when she kept talking about her 2 grown daughters. But then I thought the twist was that Bianca wasn't actually dead at all! Unless Leda was also dead and that's how she spoke to her on the phone 😵‍💫

I thought the movie was incredible. I was so moved and my husband also really enjoyed it. Jessie Buckley was fantastic and I loved seeing a more complicated and realistic version of motherhood. I'm pretty sure from reviews I read that she is meant to have died at the end but it's ambiguous in the movie and the book version.

I was so suprised that the few people I spoke to had hated it, my boss, my dad and a sibling all thought it was rubbish which I just couldn't understand. Even if the character is unliveable I was absolutely gripped throughout.

The bit where she wouldn't move her lounger on the beach was a very mumsnet dilemma!

I wonder if men wouldn't like it as it reveals just how shit motherhood can be for women: an inconvenient truth?

Absolutely loved it. Loved seeing a woman not give a fuck and live like most men in her circle, loved the honesty of not thriving as a mother and seeing her career and happiness suffer, loved the ambiguity of her doing baffling things as we all sometimes do.

iirc, Maggie Gyllenhall (director) did an interview afterwards and said OC’s character definitely wasn’t dead at the end, but I think the book leans the other way?

She reminded me in some ways of the mother in We need to talk about Kevin, who was also a mother who did not thrive in motherhood. And was also hugely punished for it. Although I read that years ago, before I actually had children.