Maggie Gyllenhaal has created a great European-style film in the best traditions of European cinema. This is a very refreshing achievement given that the current European cinema has started to resemble one very long and predictable Romanian film.
The film pulls you in slowly into its psychological web of relationships and nuances. In Gyllenhaal Elena Ferrante has found an excellent match for her literary style. This is a film without a “message” (and in my world that is a big plus) – it is subtle and questioning.
No need to say that Olivia Colman is great as the main character. The whole cast is superb but if I am to rank the performances, I would put Dakota Johnson and Peter Sarsgaard as my second favorites. Jessey Buckley as the young Leda is good but the two actresses are so different it is hard to believe the “evolution” of the young woman into the old one. They are like two different persons and may by that was a saught effect.
If you have seen the film, you already know it is about motherhood and womanhood. But it is also about class. There are two distinct groups of characters in the film – the primitives and the intellectuals. The primitives (the Greek Americans) are aggressive, patriarchal, threatening – their latent violence is suggested constantly. Motherhood is about “nature” and “submissiveness” in this milieu. The intellectuals are subtle, torn by conflicting desires, selfish, autonomous. Everything is hard in their world – including motherhood and love. And the children are a class of their own – they parade their “natural” unmitigated by education and culture inherent cruelty, aggression, and love. They are innocently cruel and constantly and aggressively demanding love and attention. Seemingly, the cliche of the joy and bliss of motherhood is completely shattered here. But is it? Leda’s parable looks pretty ironic at the end. She is portrayed as suffering for having missed something. She seems to have been punished for having left her children- the sense of regret prevails eventually. Leda’s sexual freedom and intellectual accomplishments – were they worth it? The answer is in Peter Sarsgaard character – this caricature of an intellectual, the unabashed academic narcissist who uses flattery to get sex! Was he worth it? Or the pseudo-intellectual puns passing for literary scholarship at today’s humanities conferences? What could be the price of feeling “accomplished” in this kind of field? Maybe melancholy – the kind of melancholy that can be crushing.
Gyllanhaal has achieved a level of complexity that can make Ana Karenina’s story look didactic.
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