Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal
Screenplay by Maggie Gyllenhaal
Based on the novel by Elena Ferrante

Netflix from 31 January 2021

CAST

Olivia Coleman – Leda Caruso
Jesse Buckley – Young Leda
Dakota Johnson – Nina
Ed Harris – Lyle
Peter Sarsgaard – Professor Hardy
Dagmara Dominczyk – Callista
Paul Mescal – Will
Jack Farthing – Joe, young Elena’s husband
Oliver Jackson-Cohen – Toni
Panos Koronis – Vassili
Alexandros Mylonas – Professor Cole

We had the New Year’s Eve opening of this one on Netflix written on the calendar and the notice board in the kitchen. Elena Ferrante’s TV series of My Brilliant Friend (in Italian) is one of our favourite ever programmes, and we are eagerly awaiting the third series. Yes, we needed subtitles, but I was told the Neapolitan dialects get so strong that people use the standard Italian subtitles in Italy. We also saw the stage play (reviewed here). Karen read all the novels as did all her friends. I stuck to the TV series and the stage play, though just before Covid we bought the audio book for the car, but haven’t been anywhere far enough away to listen to it.

This is not from that same best-selling Neapolitan Quartet of novels (published 2012 to 2015). It predates them and was her third novel, written in 2008.

It was unsurprising to see the Sunday Times award this competent art house movie four stars in the same review that awarded a mere two stars to Don’t Look Up (LINK TO REVIEW) which we had watched two days earlier. Olivia Coleman and Jesse Buckley strike the right chord for critics who prefer to disdain Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence and Cate Blanchett. My star rating would be reversed (though I’d go three for this, and five for Don’t Look Up). Unsurprisingly, it’s already picking up awards, as such films do.

The main character, Leda, is played by Olivia Coleman as a 48 year old, and by Jesse Buckley as a twenty something. The premise is what appeals to viewers, and dare I say especially to women. At one point, the young Leda abandoned her two daughters for romance, and was away from them for three years. Far, far fewer women than men ever desert their children. Young children can be irritating in the extreme, but women are emotionally and culturally superglued to their offspring by an invisible unbroken umbilical cord. We know how strongly the idea of escape appeals, because Karen has often recounted the tale of her great-grandmother who did just that in 1911, and female listeners are always transfixed (and Karen’s tale is a far better and more dramatic story than this one). Perhaps that coloured our reaction … the plot theme was not at all novel to us.

The older Leda is on holiday on a Greek island where she has rented an apartment. She has brought two heavy suitcases of books with her. Lyle, the older American (Ed Harris) who looks after the apartments takes an interest in her. Like many an old hippy he has tales … in his case of helping Leonard Cohen write songs when Leonard visited from Hydra. He reminded me of the San Francisco taxi driver who took me to Haight-Ashbury. He told me that he’d slept with Janis Joplin (on his sofa) and dropped acid with Grace Slick. He didn’t go as far as claiming authorship of White Rabbit though.

Plot spoilers next: On the beach, Leda is asked to move by an aggressive and obnoxious extended family who are renting the large pink villa, as they do every year. She declines to shift. One of the younger women, Callista (Dagmara Dominczyk) is pregnant, the other Nina (Dakota Johnson) has a young daughter, Elena, about the same age as her own daughters were when she left them. She is a trying, irritating, constantly cloying child, who is wearing her mother down. Leda watches and it brings back memories of her own daughters (now 23 and 25), and to a degree she can empathize with Nina.

Elena gets lost, everyone panics, but she is found by Leda. Leda then finds the girl’s doll and takes it back to the apartment (it is full of water). While the family search for it, she does not tell them she has it and doesn’t know why not.

Nina, the child’s mother, is seen by Leda in passionate embrace with Will, a personable student who works on the island in the summer. They ask if they can use Leda’s apartment for a liaison … the husband frequently goes back to the mainland on business. She agrees but the husband comes back. Leda returns the doll and leaves.

In the intercut flashback story, young Leda is a translator of Italian poetry. She is invited to a conference by Professor Cole, a serious older academic. Leda has carefully prepared food and medicines for the two daughters, and gives anxious instructions to the babysitter. At the conference, she is praised by a heavily- bearded macho academic with a hairy chest and medallion (Peter Sarsgaard), who is an expert on poetry. Her affair with him causes her to leave her children … two girls, who constantly bicker.

The poet (IMDB calls him Professor Hardy, but we never noticed a name) murmurs a word or two of Italian poetry in young Leda’s ear. He may not know complete stanzas. He reminded me of the conference circuit in Europe actually. There used to be ELT conferences in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece in the Spring on almost successive weekends. The same authors would turn up at two, three or all of them. In every one a serious, bearded fellow would be seen in the coffee shop and the most expensive restaurants in deep conversation with local female teachers all day. Everyone used to mention it. He must have had some magnetism on a Bill Clinton scale.

You can see themes from My Brilliant Friend repeated, or rather foreshadowed. A holiday on the beach, seduction by an older academic poet, two young girls who are jealous of each other, husbands who leave their families at a beach and go back to work.

The positive is the way in which Olivia Coleman and Jesse Buckley believably play the same person while neither looking nor sounding alike. Sheer acting?

Older Leda says she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts but her origin is Leeds. She has her normal accent with no trace of Yorkshire. Jesse Buckley has a slight tinge of Yorkshire accent, in an apparently American setting. Will turns out to be Irish. Was there a touch of modern Shakespearean theatre? Just use your own natural accent.

Accents and origins did confuse me … I have only watched once (and am unlikely to watch again). The reviews say the obnoxious family were Italian-American. Maybe that was explicit, but I didn’t get that. I had supposed they were Italians played in English by American actors, though on checking on IMDB, that would be English, Polish and Greek actors. They could converse with Leda and she could eavesdrop on their beach chatter, but her job was Italian translation. I even thought it possible they were supposed to be Greek. Callista is a Greek name, so is Vassili … the Italian version is Basilio. The males had a threatening Mafiosi air, but that’s not exclusively Italian.

Why would Italian-Americans go to the same Greek island every year? Why would an Italian-American go back off to work for a few days every week from a remote Greek island? This is not The Catskills, the Jersey shore or The Hamptons where it was standard for the wives and children to go in the summer while the husband sweated it out in New York City and came to stay at weekends.Yes, I know many Italians and many Greeks own summer beach properties, though the whole family usually moves there for the summer.

My Italian assumption was based on Elena Ferrante’s authorship, but then she is an enigma. Her publisher is after all American.

So I checked online. In the original novel Leda is a teacher of English from Florence (whoops! A link to my ELT conference anecdote there, though Bologna was the major Italian conference). They are all Italian, holidaying in a small town on the Italian coast.

Gyllenhaal changed them to Italian-American, and Leda to English (living in America), and switched them to holidaying in Greece, but didn’t account for the husband going back and forth on business. What had happened was that Gyllenhaal had originally scripted it (On Elena Ferrante’s direct request) and set it in New Jersey so that then everything falls into place. Covid stopped all that, and Italy was also problematic. A Greek island location allowed them to quarantine, then isolate cast and crew for the duration of filming.

I had thought it highly unlikely that the two Ledas met on set, as they never appear together. Not so – the entire film was shot on Spetses, including all the American sequences.

The young daughter on the island is called Elena. While everyone knows that Elena Ferrante is a pen name, it is odd to name a major character after yourself even at such a remove. I’ve used ‘Peter’ in novels, but only ever for minor peripheral characters.

Yes, the acting especially from all three female leads is excellent, but you probably know that from reading the cast list. It didn’t inspire either of us in the end. Yes, it’s obviously watchable, but it didn’t strike a chord with either of us. Disappointing.

***