The mind of Leda Caruso is a complicated place, brought to always vivid, sometimes erotic, occasionally terrifying life by writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal and her director of photography, Hélène Louvart.
Marking Gyllenhaal’s feature directorial debut, The Lost Daughter (on Netflix Friday) is adapted from the novel by Elena Ferrante, and follows a literature scholar on vacation in Greece as she encounters a rambunctious—and, maybe, dangerous—family, whose various incidents and dramas take her back to her own struggles in motherhood. If relatively light on plot, the drama makes for an ingeniously claustrophobic experience, forcing the audience into Leda’s inner-life as she reckons with her choices and still-unresolved feelings about being a parent, daughter, and human being in the world. (Olivia Colman plays Leda in the present, with Jessie Buckley starring as her younger counterpart via flashbacks.)
The evocative script accomplishes plenty in that department, but so too does the precise cinematography. The French-born Louvart—whose 30-plus-year career has spanned films helmed by Léos Carax, Agnès Varda, and Claire Denis—plays off of classic cinematic tropes and genres, deftly depicting womanhood as it has historically been captured on film, before delving into these familiar images’ darker, deeper, oft-unspoken truths. The result is a bold and uncompromising debut, stuffed with frames that tell the story both of a complex heroine, and of a thrilling collaboration between a first-time director and a legendary DP.
Leda’s earliest experiences on the beach by her hotel find her observing the massive family that intrudes upon her peace—specifically, Nina (Dakota Johnson), the young mother who eventually becomes her obsession. These scenes unfurl with a quiet subjectivity. “We’re always in Leda’s P.O.V. looking at Nina,” Gyllenhaal explains. “What we’re telling you is, if you want to come on this trip with us, you have to get into Leda’s mind. Leda’s mind is the way through. We’re imagining what’s happening with the water on Nina’s body. That’s not real. That’s in Leda’s mind.
“We’re doing something that’s very classic cinematically to do to a beautiful woman on film,” Gyllenhaal continues. “We’re observing her and adoring her…for this whole first section of the movie, where Dakota doesn’t speak except from really far away.” Abruptly, shortly after this scene, Nina then comes up to Leda to thank her for finding her young daughter when she runs off: “This woman who has just been being adored and observed is hungry and totally dissatisfied and deeply confused. She has a whole life that we’re not used to seeing in the life of a beautiful woman in a bathing suit on the beach. Suddenly, the language changes.”
One other key element: The doll all but hiding in the left corner of the frame, a bit of visual foreshadowing reflective of The Lost Daughter’s careful cinematic storytelling.
Flashbacks to Leda’s life as a young mother culminate in the affair she begins abroad with Professor Hardy (Peter Sarsgaard). The connection sparks at this gathering. “We really didn’t have much money so we created this dinner party,” Gyllenhaal says. “I wanted it to look like an artist lived in a loft in an old space and just had a big table and almost nothing on the walls, and just created it in a corner. We were asked to cut this scene many, many times because we didn’t have the time. I was like, ‘We’re going to get it one shot.’”
We see Leda on fire in this scene: You see the heat on her face, the excitement. “She's being adored,” Gyllenhaal says. “It’s the heat of this love affair, which is based on a connection of their minds.” It also proves a crucial contrast to the young Leda we saw back at home, overwhelmed by chaos and professionally unfulfilled.
The spontaneity with which the scene had to be filmed, in pure financial terms, translated to the actors’ performances—a kind of joy and ease radiating off the screen. “They got in a very good mood at this moment,” Louvart recalls with a laugh. “We were just here to catch this moment. They did it, it was in front of us. Everything was ready.”
If The Lost Daughter has an inciting incident, Leda taking the doll belonging to Nina’s daughter—and, inexplicably, holding onto it in secret—would be the one. Images of Leda with the doll take on a still, painterly quality, particularly as they increasingly inform glimpses into her past as a child and mother herself. “It was not so easy,” Louvart says dryly. “For us, it was very important to feel that, of course, she’s with the doll—but the doll also could observe her.” In other words, Louvart strived to capture a sense of humanity within the inanimate object.
The sadness overwhelming Leda here is a result of memory; this shot coincides with the prior flashback, of her dining with the professor, which is followed up with remembering the end of the affair. Louvart calls this image an example of “good simple” that was a focus throughout filming. Explains Gyllenhaal, “I wanted it very simple so that there’s space to feel all sorts of things around it.”
The writer-director admits that delineating the relationship between Leda and the doll was tricky, just as it’s supposed to be for the viewer who struggles to interpret it. “This is a very fine line in shooting and in cutting and in writing. This is a sane person who does this very unusual thing,” she says. “I’m just looking at this picture and thinking, if you just saw this picture, the story of what’s happening here is so—it’s so mysterious and compelling to me, this image.”
Pulling off The Lost Daughter’s most pivotal scene—building to this wrenching confession from Leda, which we won’t spoil here—required a certain amount of cinematic derring-do. “The script is very much like the film—there aren’t huge changes or huge cuts—but this scene did not come to life until we shifted it and cut it quite a lot in the editing room,” says Gyllenhaal. Such flexibility reflects the texture of the scene, which finds Leda at last spending one-on-one time with Nina after a flea market bump-in. As their walk-and-talk turns more intimate, Leda unexpectedly reveals her darkest secret.
Louvart describes the scene’s filmic goal as one where they had to “trap” Leda with Nina, to get them close in a big, open, crowded space where she could no longer hold it in. Accordingly, this marked one of the specific times the pair employed the handheld Ronin camera, with Louvart operating it herself. (Time is money, and this production didn’t have a ton of either.) “We did not know how we would follow them,” Louvart explains. The script was much longer than the finished cut; Gyllenhaal mandated for this major scene that every take be shot all the way through, and found her way into it from there.
“I don’t think you end with Olivia doing this beautiful work if we just pop in on a close up of her,” Gyllenhaal says. “Not every take looked like this. There were takes where she was totally stoic. There were takes where she was angry. There were takes where she was very quiet and emotional like this. But every take was different because we started at the beginning and we saw where we ended at the end.”
Following the confession, as well as several developments pertaining to the missing doll, Leda lets loose at this party with her kind-of-love-interest, Lyle (Ed Harris). Here was another instance of Louvart operating the Ronin herself—this time, for both creative and practical reasons, since the operator couldn’t be COVID-cleared due to testing—and getting in the thick of a scene right beside her actors. The sense of joy turns to dread once Nina’s family arrives at the party. “Everything is coming close to you and suddenly we stop,” as Louvart describes her approach. “I didn’t want the handheld to be too obvious. We moved exactly as Leda did. When she moved a lot, we moved a lot. When she started to jump, we jumped.” One of Louvart’s touches throughout the film was to focus on Leda’s entire body: “Olivia acts so well with her body. She plays with everything.”
Gyllenhaal reminds that Louvart shot Wim Wenders’s Pina 3D, a documentary about contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch. “She knows how to shoot dancers—not that they’re dancing like human beings, but also I think it has this sort of feverish quality,” Gyllenhaal says, before addressing her D.P. directly. “You were talking about the light following them, moving in and out of darkness, them being almost like a little bit of a tunnel vision, which is kind of what’s happening to her. Things are starting to spring a leak inside of her.”
Louvart emphasizes the importance of subtly but clearly identifying the scene’s mood shift, as the shot above does: “When she had to stop, we stop also at the same time—to feel that it’s over.” As she follows Leda onto the dark streets of Spetses, she captures her clearly, surrounded by shadows and darkness. “The light was film noir,” Louvart says of her feel for this section. “We took out all the streetlights and we got some spots like this…. The street was not lit like this, but at this moment it’s supposed to be scary. So it’s totally fake light. When you have black light, it means something in real life no longer exists.”
“In a kind of cinematic language, shots like this and her P.O.V., they tell you, this is scary, get scared, something scary is going to happen,” Gyllenhaal says. “We wanted to play with the horror movie, the thriller: Is she in peril? There’s a whole tradition in movies where someone might show up at her house and hurt her. We were playing with that.”
And for Louvart, the most important part of this sequence to emphasize was the red dress, a stark metaphor for how Leda feels through much of The Lost Daughter: “She’s exposed.”
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