Tag: the lost daughter

Films: Hament, Dir.Chloé Zhao, 2025

The biggest issue is that the film is based on a very weak — not to say ridiculous — novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Chloé Zhao’s decision to adapt this particular book does not reflect especially well on her intelligence. How many stories about women-healers mistaken for witches can one endure? How many female characters cast as embodiments of “Mother Nature” are we expected to feel deeply for? And how many blood-soaked childbirth scenes hovering on the edge of death can a single film sustain?

Shakespeare’s wife giving birth among the enormous, fairy-tale roots of a tree — if this is not kitsch, what is? We see Shakespeare being slapped around by his father. Then the playwright suddenly grows restless — though we are given no real reason why — and leaves his wife to endure the birth of their second child alone. She refuses to give birth inside the house and insists on delivering the baby among the tree roots. Shall I go on?

I feel genuinely sorry for Jessie Buckley, who is a very good actress (The Lost Daughter) and deserves better material. As for Paul Mescal — less so. Throughout the entire film he looks silly and ridiculous.

Books: The Lying Life of Adults. A Novel by Elena Ferrante, 2019

I have previously had mixed feelings about the writings of Elena Ferrante. My esteem of her rose after the film adaptation of “The Lost Daughter” by Maggie Gylenhaal, a truly original and thought-provoking film. My initial complaints about her fiction were related to the first part of the Neapolitan quartet – “My Brilliant Friend” which I found cliched and uninspiring, especially her very traditional class-struggles approach. In contrast – I was impressed by “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” which is an example of an in-depth look into the motherhood and womanhood themes of her previous books and a sort of more incisive continuation of “The Lost Daughter.” In the former, I enjoyed the string of character studies – contradictory and complex, the prose – dense and subtle, the non-judgemental representation of opposing kinds of “femininity,” the ambiguity of female strife for independence as a mix of libration and egotism. “We all narrate our lives as it suits us.” writes Ferrante. This is the powerful message of “Those Who Stay and Those Who Leave” – and it is the meta-revelation of the first-person narrative in that novel.

In “The Lying Life of Adults,” this principle is taken to a level of arbitrariness. An exceptionally smart girl, the author wants us to believe, is debunking the “narrative” of the adults that surround her as lies. Doing that she builds her own, supposedly innocent and honest, narrative. Not a new thing, by the way (i.e. What Maisie Knew) . The problem with the narrative of the coming-of-age girl, is that at some point the “disbelief” cannot be suspended. It becomes impossible to give credit to her unusual for her age intelligence, her interest in higher matters of politics and philosophy, the impression she creates for adults and peers, and her supposedly penetrating representations of the adults in her life. This time, Ferrante is invested too much in binary oppositions: ugly-beautiful, dreamy-cynical, rich-poor, entitled-self-made, so that instead of transforming into psychological “depth” the oppositions come across as confusing and arbitrary. In the main character’s narrative everything becomes possible and hence — not engaging.