Subversive Cinematography of Netflix’s ‘The Lost Daughter’

Leda Caruso’s mind is a complex place, brought to life by the writer-director who is always alive, sometimes erotic, sometimes terrifying. Maggie Gyllenhaal and her director of photography, Helene Louvart.

Marking Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, Daughter is gone (on Netflix Friday) adapted from the novel by Elena Ferrante, and follows a literary scholar on vacation in Greece as she encounters a bad — and, possibly, dangerous — family, featuring multiple incidents and dramas that return her to her own struggles. in the role of mother. If it’s relatively light on plot, the film creates an ingeniously claustrophobic experience, forcing the audience to immerse themselves in Leda’s inner life as she ponders her choices and the emotions that have yet to be discovered. answers about parenting, daughter and people in the world. (Olivia Colman plays the role of Leda in the present, with Jessie Buckley plays her younger colleague through flashback.)

The suggestive script accomplishes a lot in that department, but so does the precise cinematography. Louvart was born in France – whose career of more than 30 years has been spent in films produced by Leos Carax, Agnes Varda, and Claire Denis—Discarding classic cinematic genres and images, deftly portraying womanhood as recorded history on film, before diving into darker, deeper, untold truths of these familiar images. The result is a bold and uncompromising debut, with frames that tell the story of both a complex heroine and of a thrilling collaboration between a first-time director and a legendary DP.