When Maggie Gyllenhaal read for the first time the lost daughter, by Elena Ferrante she felt an immediate crush. But a complicated crush. “It came to me something very strange and painful, but also undeniably true,” she explains.
"A secret part of my experience as a mother, as a lover, as a woman in the world, he was expressing himself out loud for the first time.” That thought and her desire to jump into directing were the origin of the dark daughter (Theatrical release February 18).
The first thing she did was, for weeks, prepare an email for Elena Ferrante, the great unknown, and her publisher, in which she asked him to give her the rights to adapt the story. The writer who hides behind that pseudonym answered it and gave it to him, with one condition, she could only direct it Maggie Gyllenhaal. She would give him total freedom, she wanted him to make it her own, but if the film was directed by someone else, the deal would be void, especially if that person was a man.
A vacation in peace.
With that freedom granted by the author, whom Gyllenhaal never knew and imagines as “Fantasy woman” of “70 years old and she is very wise, compassionate and caring”, the actress turned screenwriter and director for the first time found that her film will dialogue “directly with the book”, but being very different.
In the novel, the story takes place in Naples. In Gyllenhaal's mind, it was originally on the coast of New England, she wanted to shoot in New Jersey, or find somewhere between Cape Cod and Maine. However, the pandemic changed her plans and opened up an opportunity she hadn't even dreamed of.
Thus, Gyllenhaal and his women they ended up in the Greek island of Spetses, in the Aegean, near the Peloponnese. They renamed it as a fictional place Kyopeli and there they rolled for september 2020, in a dream bubble, without cases of covid on the island and without tourists: its 22 square kilometers and its past as a vacation destination respected everything for them.
THE HISTORY
Leda (Olivia Colman) is a 48-year-old university professor from Cambridge, near Boston. Determined to spend a quiet vacation and be able to write, she rents a house on the island of Kyopeli. she receives it Lyle (EdHarris) an American who has been there for years and takes care of the best properties in the area. Leda goes every morning to a small beach, with a quiet beach bar that has nothing but espresso and ice cream.
Dakota Johnson is Nina.
The hours pass in calm, baths, hammock, reading, writing. And suddenly, the peace is broken. A noisy, Greek-American family, he bursts into the cove and they pretend until she moves to which she refuses.
Among the family, Nina (Dakota Johnson) a young mother with her little daughter Elena, with whom Leda becomes obsessed and begins to think about her own past from young mother (Jessie Buckley), when she was 20 and a few years old she was raising two daughters and trying to move up in her academic and intellectual career.
Do you feel watched?
The ghosts of the past, her guilt as her mother that still haunts her, her feeling of “unnatural mother”, they lead him to do things that intensify a thriller and a tension that we mind in the head and mood of Leda.
THE PLACES
The whole movie is shot in Spetses, Even the scenes that supposedly take place in Massachusetts 20 years ago were filmed on Saronic Island (specifically, in a school in the 1920s, Anargrians and Korgialenians) . The dark daughter may encourage other productions and more visitors, as it happened to Skopelos after Mamma Mia!, and revive a calm and sustained tourism of the 80s, cars are prohibited and so are high-rise buildings.
Will and Leda at Bouboulina Taverna.
Inside the island, they were in almost all its points. In the village of Spetses, in the eastern district of Kounoupitsa is Leda's apartment and the Mosquito Tavern, where the protagonist can take advantage of breakfast.
In dapia, another neighborhood of the town, is Boubouline, the tavern where she dines with Will, the boy from the beach bar. Greek classic. south is bikini, the terrace bar over the old harbour, where Leda and Lyle dance until Nina's family arrive with their menacing spirit.
Maggie Gyllenhaal at one of the Greek t'avernas'.
Another of the tense scenes occurs in the Titania Cinema, a classic open-air cinema from the 1960s, recently refurbished.
and the beach is Zogeria, to the northwest, considered the prettiest on the island. Divided in two, the film chose the smallest of the coves.