Leda Caruso, like me, is 48 years old and has two children. This is not the only reason I identified with this character of Elena Ferrante, which Maggie Gyllenhaal wears on screen in The Lost Daughter (showing next Friday before landing on Netflix at the end of the month).
In this adaptation of the novel Stolen doll (The figlia oscura), published in 2006 – that is to say before the wonderful saga The prodigious friend -, Olivia Colman plays Leda, a comparative literature teacher who decides to go on vacation alone to the sea, in a Greek island.
Leda meets Nina (Dakota Johnson) there, a young mother who can no longer take the repeated requests (to go play, to bathe, etc.) and the incessant fits of tears from her 2-year-old daughter, Elena. This plunges Leda back into the not always rosy memories of her own motherhood, at the time when her daughters were not yet the age of reason.
Maggie Gyllenhaal, a well-known actress who writes and directs her first film – screenplay prize at the Venice Film Festival -, lets the daughters of Leda (in flashbacks) and Nina cry for a long time on the screen, so that the spectators will come to grips with them. – even are exasperated by these throbbing complaints and irritating hissings. It works…
Girls constantly demand the attention of their respective mothers. They want to be entertained, cuddled, held in their arms without interruption or consideration for the back pain that this causes. They are sometimes capricious, selfish, aggressive, even violent.
One day, Elena loses her beloved doll at the beach. She is inconsolable. She no longer sleeps at night, has fits during the day. Nina is exhausted, at her wit’s end and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. As was Leda at the same age. We are introduced to her 20 years earlier (played by Jessie Buckley), struggling to work on her thesis in a crowded apartment, while her daughters have fun getting excited, slamming a French door and shattering a window. of glass for a peccadille.
PHOTO YANNIS DRAKOULIDIS, SUPPLIED BY THE PRODUCTION
Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter
Many parents have experienced such episodes, to varying degrees, some more calmly than others. I recognized myself in this gloomy picture.
Nothing prepares us for the exercise of extreme patience that is parenting. The self-control required to let a 3-year-old’s bacon crisis subside in a public place. To the self-sacrifice necessary to cross in zenitude the ordeal of a small body which tenses and stiffens at the sight of a snowsuit that will inevitably have to be put on.
To the calm, calm and responsible management of an argument provoked by an older brother who decides, for his malicious pleasure, because he is bored, to tease his brother until he comes off his hinges, to the back of a car, during a long drive to a vacation destination. Nothing.
A friend, who has teens the same age as mine, recently told me that she would gladly relive those magical early childhood years. Not me. Obviously I sometimes nostalgia for their chubby hands, their candid bursts of laughter and the attacks of kisses on their soft, cool cheeks. But these spontaneous mood swings, these uncontrolled impulses, these nagging tears, not the least.
I sometimes look back with regret on the times when I lost patience with my boys and am ashamed of some of my reactions. Polite requests becoming repetitive pleas, then firm orders and exasperated cries. With a flushed face, bulging eyes, I never broke a window, but I slammed doors. It seems like a very distant memory to me.
This week, I ran into a number of young parents who were overwhelmed by the absolutely unsuccessful combination of pandemic-teleworking-strike by childcare workers. These parents may have been in solidarity with the educators who take care of their children on a daily basis, and hope for better conditions for them, they were the collateral victims of this labor dispute.
Many have been pushed to their limits lately. The pandemic has left them for nearly two years strapped for resources, isolated, sometimes without the support of their extended family to take over and give them respite.
Dealing with the incessant flow of requests for children who require discontinuous parental presence, do not want to hear any complaints from adults and cannot understand, in any case, the meaning of the expression “be reasonable”, is excessively taxing. Faced with this burden, by dint of wanting to do everything, many parents lose their calm or become zombies.
A young colleague told me this week, when his apartment is being renovated and the childcare centers are closed, that he took advantage of his 2-year-old son’s naps and short nights to write his articles. He had dark circles up to his chin.
The pandemic has been difficult for everyone, of course. Especially for parents who have had to telecommute for months, young children by their side. And who still have to do it today, due to strikes or reported cases of COVID-19 at school or daycare. See The Lost Daughter reminded me to be indulgent with them. And with the parents of young children that we ourselves have been.