The Redemption of the Bad Mother

The moments I felt most viscerally in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, an intermittently dreamy and menacing exploration of maternal ambivalence, weren’t when Leda (played by Olivia Colman) confesses, weeping, that as a young mother she abandoned her children, or when a worm wriggles out of the mouth of the doll that Leda has stolen, as if to literalize the movie’s themes of love and caretaking corrupted. Rather, two other scenes felt jarring to me: one when Leda is sitting in blissful solitude on a beach, and another when she’s at a cinema watching The Last Time I Saw Paris. In both, Leda’s contented absorption is rudely interrupted by loud, thoughtless groups who commandeer her space and disrupt her peace.

This is, it has to be said, a fairly brutal re-creation of the experience of having children. In motherhood, there is no anymore; there are no idle stretches of time within which to ruminate or look at the sky or simply let your mind do nothing at all. There is no“the world bears the taint of my leaving, so that abandonment must now be subtracted from the sum of whatever I choose to do. A visit to the cinema is no longer that: It is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.”