Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The lost daughter": otherness and ambivalence

Abstract

Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the movie The lost daughter, adapted from homonymous novel written by Elena Ferrante, narrates Leda´s vacation, a College
Professor who questions her own maternity when she gets in touch with a young mother and her daughter. Inside an uncomfortable game of mirrors, the protagonist dives into her past, gradually exposing her biography, surprising the spectator with family revelations. This review proposal is to analyse the film in the key of otherness and discuss the characters motivations from the meeting and the generations conflict, especially regarding to motherhood ambivalences perspective. Topics such as aging, female sexual freedom, marriage, emerge from the cinematographic narrative, released in 2021, and
starring Olivia Colman. One of the goals is to examine the film using the book The second sex, by Simone de Beauvoir (2019), for whom a woman is not born a woman, she becomes a woman, since the social pressures and the adjustments demanded by the patriarchal configuration delineate the feminine.