Post by Dracula on Jan 10, 2022 23:58:05 GMT -5
The Lost Daughter(1/4/2022)
I’m not sure I knew the name “Olivia Colman” before her Oscar-winning star turn in the 2018 movie The Favourite but she’s certainly been everywhere since then… to the point that I think I might have already gotten sick of her. Her whole sarcastic lady schtick seems to show up to some extent in ever role she plays and it’s kind of making me question her range and it feels particularly odd in her latest film, the Maggie Gyllenhaal directed Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter. This isn’t to say I completely hated her performance here, I didn’t, but there always seems to be something of a layer to it that didn’t quite seem to match the movie which is otherwise very serious. The film looks at a woman who’s vacationing in Greece when she spots a mother and daughter on a beach and it triggers some memories of her own time being kind of a terrible mother. The setup of the film with a sort of epiphany being brought on by seeing a child on a beach somewhat invokes Visconti’s Death in Venice though the nature of the epiphany is pretty different and the film is overall quite different in tone. That this was adapted from a novel shouldn’t be too surprising as this definitely has one of those structures that’s clearly meant to give a lot of space for internal monologue and at times characters behave in ways that are perhaps more symbolic than realistic. The film is ultimately a character study about someone’s past catching up with them and I might have liked the film’s sporadic flashbacks to have been a bit more extensive, but I can kind of see why they didn’t do that as well. Not sure this movie was really for me, but it has a good command of tone and some decent acting and I can’t complain about it too much.
*** out of Five
I’m not sure I knew the name “Olivia Colman” before her Oscar-winning star turn in the 2018 movie The Favourite but she’s certainly been everywhere since then… to the point that I think I might have already gotten sick of her. Her whole sarcastic lady schtick seems to show up to some extent in ever role she plays and it’s kind of making me question her range and it feels particularly odd in her latest film, the Maggie Gyllenhaal directed Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter. This isn’t to say I completely hated her performance here, I didn’t, but there always seems to be something of a layer to it that didn’t quite seem to match the movie which is otherwise very serious. The film looks at a woman who’s vacationing in Greece when she spots a mother and daughter on a beach and it triggers some memories of her own time being kind of a terrible mother. The setup of the film with a sort of epiphany being brought on by seeing a child on a beach somewhat invokes Visconti’s Death in Venice though the nature of the epiphany is pretty different and the film is overall quite different in tone. That this was adapted from a novel shouldn’t be too surprising as this definitely has one of those structures that’s clearly meant to give a lot of space for internal monologue and at times characters behave in ways that are perhaps more symbolic than realistic. The film is ultimately a character study about someone’s past catching up with them and I might have liked the film’s sporadic flashbacks to have been a bit more extensive, but I can kind of see why they didn’t do that as well. Not sure this movie was really for me, but it has a good command of tone and some decent acting and I can’t complain about it too much.
*** out of Five
