The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021) Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, and some blokes including Ed Harris
SPOILERS
Wits said that Kidman won the Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf by a nose. Colman might lose an Oscar by the skin of her teeth. ... Or her gums, to be more precise.
This is deliberately bewildering (if you don't read the Wikipedia plot summary before watching the film). I at first assumed that the younger Leda was actually Leda's mother. The flashbacks come thick and fast with no boundary markers in between. Also the dialogue is often out of sync with the visual. And there are extreme closeups (particularly in the earlier part of flick) apparently for their own sake: I couldn't perceive any motivation.
I assume it's meant to be read as an 'art film' - which label lets the director do what she likes (and as it is her first go, why not). The main character can appear to be dying and then sit up and brightly take a phone call while at the same time peeling an orange which has miraculously appeared. (Sorry, that is definitely a spoiler - but it's in the Wikipedia article!)
Unlike critics quoted below, I don't think the cast is 'brilliant', nor that the story is 'daringly ambitious'. It might be a bit daring in that it's about something so banal that it risks being about nothing. I should think that every parent has moments when they wish they weren't (parents). And quite a few of them walk away from the role. It's usually fathers, but sometimes it's a mother - as here. It's quite understandable, quotidian, mundane, and would be boring in this case if it weren't for the film's (and I presume the novel's) quirks: the doll, the name Leda (Yeats, mythology), the hatpin, and the 'sophisticated' translating, as well as the tricksy cinematics I mentioned earlier. And the 'exotic' setting on one of the 'isles of Greece' (Byron).
But I did learn how to use a hatpin (correctly, as well as maliciously :)
IMDb page.
Wikipedia page. Excerpt:
At its opening night world premiere, the movie received a four-minute standing ovation from Venice Film Festival attendees in the Sala Grande.
On Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 192 critic reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.90/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "A strikingly assured debut for writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter unites a brilliant cast in service of a daringly ambitious story. By contrast, only 48 per cent of audience reviewers have a positive rating, with comments such as “impenetrable” and “arty Oscar-bait”. On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 86 out of 100, based on reviews from 46 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Garry Gillard | New: 8 February, 2022 | Now: 8 February, 2022