How Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ‘Lost Daughter’ Covers Spectrum of Maternal Emotion

variety.com:

Tim Gray Senior Vice PresidentHollywood has given us a wide range of mothers, including the hard-working and devoted (“Claudine”), the self-sacrificing (“Bambi”) and the monstrous (“The Manchurian Candidate”).It’s hard to come up with anything new on the subject, but first-time writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, adapting Elena Ferrante’s novel, constantly surprises us by depicting several mothers who are complex, original and have the ring of truth in “The Lost Daughter.”“The book and, I hope, the film articulate a lot of the experience about being a woman that we don’t often talk about,” Gyllenhaal tells Variety. “Not just in terms of mothering and how complicated it is — it brings you to your knees.

It’s also very difficult for us to hold in our minds the idea that a mother will have elements that are good and bad. There’s a very childish part of ourselves that needs to separate these things. “Being a parent includes a huge spectrum of things that we don’t usually talk about.

And it’s not just mothering, but also sexuality, also what it’s like to be a woman who’s a thinker in the world. There hasn’t been a lot expressed about that, especially in film.”“Daughter” has engendered a lot of (deserved) Oscar buzz, for Gyllenhaal’s work and the performances, particularly for Olivia Colman.

She plays a professor on holiday in Greece who is fascinated by Nina (Dakota Johnson), also on the island with a young daughter and an army of in-laws.“It’s a very grownup thing that we’re asking an audience to consider: Can you reconcile a woman who is both a ‘bad mother’ and a ‘good mother’?“I’ve been asked about making a film about ‘an unlikable woman,’” says Gyllenhaal. “There are aspects of me that are unlikable.