TIES THAT BIND: MYTH AND METAPHOR IN ‘THE LOST DAUGHTER'

‘By shedding light in dark places, Gyllenhaal and Ferrante might give those who are or desire to be mothers a larger framework for their fears and anxieties and improve on the why of a landscape in which as women have more agency, they are having fewer children’

- Soleil Nathwani

Don’t let it break, peel it like a snake! Don’t let it break, peel it like a snake!” The words are sung part childlike rhyme, part bewitching chant, part haunting refrain by a young mother and her two little daughters in the final mesmeric frame of The Lost Daughter, actor-turned writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s 2021 Netflix film adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novella of the same name. At the end of the film, our protagonist, Leda – reimagined for the screen as a British professor by a superbly prickly Olivia Colman – has collapsed on the shore, capping what was meant to be a rejuvenating working vacation in a beachside Greek idyll. Instead, the holiday has been soured by intrusive memories of fraught motherhood.

When Leda is finally slapped to life by an errant wave, it appears she may have escaped death. She calls her now-grown daughters, imagining as she does, the way they would plead for her to peel oranges in a long, unbroken coil. For her, the bittersweet memory recalls her daughters’ assigning a mythic quality to her minor skills, but also their incessant demands; their refusal to let her put motherhood aside for even a moment in the service of herself. These recurring leitmotifs of orange peel and snake, and the umbilical cord they evoke, suggest that for Leda motherhood is both treasure and torment, a cord she has tried and failed to cut.