Maggie Gyllenhaal delivered an arresting adaptation of a lesser-known Elena Ferrante novel—with the help of some heavyweight performers.
premiering at Venice Film Festival September 3 with a limited theatrical release December 17 and a Netflix streaming release December 31, Gyllenhaal skillfully alters the backgrounds, location, and circumstances of Ferrante’s characters in order to clear the ground to tell her own version of the story., is a Cambridge, Mass-dwelling academic—a very Harvard way of saying a Harvard professor—originally from Leeds, UK, who takes her holiday in Greece.
To this end, Gyllenhaal devises a visual language that’s as capricious as it is arresting. She knows exactly what she wants to capture and how, and we can feel it in the pacing and framing. Some scenes feel languid, even eerie in their slow movement, like when Leda’s bed-and-breakfast host insists on spending the day with her. Others, especially the flashbacks to Leda’s young motherhood, are dizzyingly quick, sharp, and intense.
shows up as Will, an attractive young Irish worker at the beach who charms and is charmed by Leda. In their scenes together, we feel Leda’s spark, a lust for vitality that sets her at odds with the image that’s been thrust upon her as a middle-aged mother.
The weathering, as it were, is internal. Yet the film develops strategies to draw those emotions outward. Ferrante’s source material is undeniably strong—the novel skillfully unveils myriad disturbances and a major twist that I won’t reveal here. But Gyllenhaal,, teases out those plot points into her own exciting emotional terrain. A director cannot transcribe a writer’s style onto screen—it’s up to them to do the work of adaptation, which is to say, to make something else entirely.
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