“I’m a very selfish person,” explains Leda Caruso (Olivia Colman), a literature professor who lives in a Greek coastal town in The prodigal daughter. Based on a novel by Elena Ferrante, the directorial debut of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal Leda follows, a mother of two adult daughters Bianca and Marta, who is looking for a quiet corner to read, write and relax. Leda believes she discovered such a place on the sunny beach of a resort. The older caretaker Lyle (a still dashing Ed Harris) seems to have eyes for her. As is the young, happy Irish student Will (Paul Mescal).
However, her downtime is interrupted when she encounters a harmful family who show little consideration for those around them. The matriarch of the family, a pregnant Callie (Dagmara Domińczyk), displeases Leda with her micro-aggressions. Conversely, Leda is obsessed with Callie’s relatives: Nina (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter Elena (Athena Martin). Leda sees part of herself in Nina, a young woman struggling with motherhood. Gyllenhaal confirms this in a series of flashbacks to Leda’s younger years (played by the always fantastic Jessie Buckley) when she was a graduate of comparative literature who balanced her studies with caring for her precocious daughters.
In directing the drama, Gyllenhaal speaks openly about the difficulties of motherhood and the idea that not everyone is fit for the role (in that regard, the film works well as a complement to Mike Mills’ recent one C’mon C’mon
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Gyllenhaal and camerawoman Helene Louvart discover extensive complexities in the terrain of the faces of these actors. In contrast to the impulses of many other filmmakers, including more extraordinary ones like Ridley Scott in Gucci’s house, the filmmakers have broken through the sober, repetitive imagery of media compositions and made the power of close-up their own. The camera, rarely in a hurry about how long to engage with a character, is constantly searching Colman’s face for the source of conflicting emotions that gush from her.
The expressive Colman takes up these moments with ease. For example, when Callie asks her to move her umbrella, Leda’s crisp lips turn downward to show contempt. At other times, the ecstasy of flight consumes her face and body: as does the nightly exuberance she and Lyle share while dancing to Bon Jovi. Flirtatious cracks break out and cause a sly smile on Colman’s face. Leda can also be wistful: She watches how overwhelmed Nina struggles to take care of Elena. Seeing mother and daughter interact, Leda lets go, and painful memories of Bianca and Marta’s upbringing shake her and cause her to faint.
The prodigal daughter absorbs itself in extremes. Louvart’s photography captures the sun as a character; it can make the colors of the brown sand, green trees, and crystal blue water almost overwhelmingly vivid. Mixed with a barren environment full of contemplation, neither the inside nor the outside is ostentatious, the mood with regard to past loved ones and distant children resembles that of Richard Linklater Before midnight. The parallel wins deepen Leda and Lyle’s relationship. They are two of a kind, imperfect parents to their respective children.
“I’m an unnatural mother,” Leda later explains to Nina. The personal shortcomings of the faulty parents are the dramatic excitement of Gyllenhaal’s film. It is the desire to run away when the parental coat for which you are ill-equipped becomes untenable. Each character tries in vain to avoid their childlike role: Lyle lives almost alone in the endless summer of this Greek setting; Nina finds solace in a lover; and Leda fled abroad when she was young. Despite the deepest desires of these characters, born of a kind of selfishness, they cannot wish their children away. Nor can they ignore their internalized regrets as parents for assuming certain responsibilities.
These difficulties bubble up in Nina and Lyle, but they are most felt in the arches of Leda’s past and present life. Although Buckley and Colman have little in common physically, they share a common spirit, from the expressiveness of their faces to the way they internalize their anger. They also share the talent to act out performative false impressions; the way people can converse in small talk with memorized maneuvers, a laugh here, big eyes there, but not fully present in the moment. Leda floats through the world on this passive wave, although her true motives are never entirely known. Somehow without having direct scenes together, Colman and Buckley cultivate this continuous line and offer real, lived outlines to a complicated character.
These tangents twist and turn into a later mystery: a doll of Nina’s daughter is missing. Leda is quickly exposed as the guilty party, but the puzzle isn’t who in this situation. It’s the why. Although Leda sees the effect of the missing doll on Nina’s daughter, her yelp echoes across the beach, but Leda keeps the playmate to herself. Keep spoilers in mind: the doll is the emotional fulcrum of Leda’s feelings about her own motherhood. In breaking down Leda’s argument, Gyllenhaal relies on a deliberate tempo, accompanied by Affonso Gonçalves’ refined jazz-blues score, with some scenes arriving in a stream and others flowing leisurely. The latter is felt to be overwhelming, an intentional desire but the side effect of which could annoy some.
It’s hard to believe The prodigal daughter is Gyllenhaal’s debut feature film. The rhythms of the narrative, the reliable imagery, the precise presentations that it gains from every actor, move with the confidence of an experienced filmmaker. There is not a single scene that goes into excess, not a single superfluous line of dialogue or a shot that lingers beyond the welcome. Gyllenhaal knows exactly what she wants and how to get it. When The prodigal daughter If, in its philosophical, complex steps, is a sign of the actress who has become a writer and director, then her future as a filmmaker is as bright as the Greek sun.
