Reader’s Digest memories (plus a piece about The Lost Daughter and The Power of the Dog)

Over the past two or three years, I have done some tiny “reviews” for Reader’s Digest India. I don’t usually share them here since these are far from in-depth pieces (or even decent-sized Facebook posts), they are snippets with very basic observations – but it’s still always cool to see my byline in a magazine that was such a fixture in my house when I was growing up: a respectable-seeming “international” publication that parents and grandparents used to read (and I used to flip through for the Laughter the Best Medicine and Life’s Like That pages, full of mostly anodyne jokes with one or two gems here and there).

In the current issue, I have a two-pager (still a short piece, but 550 words is better than 270 words) about two excellent recent films, The Lost Daughter and The Power of the Dog – touching on how both, in different ways, are about societal expectations and gender straitjackets. (The piece is pasted at the end of this reminiscence.) But it was only when I bought a copy of the issue that I realised it was a 100th anniversary special – which of course makes it even more pleasing to have my name in it. It also got me remembering a period in 1991-92 when I was obsessed with old American and British cinema, and gathered a lot of information (this being pre-internet) about some of my favourite actors/directors from the old Reader’s Digests that my grandparents had lying around in their Panchshila Park house. Many of them had special features on people like Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier and Barbara Stanwyck – unremarkably written but often a treasure trove of anecdotes or biographical information.

Some memories of reading those articles are still very vivid: for instance, it was from a Reader’s Digest interview of Sophia Loren that I first learnt that Cary Grant had died in 1986. The piece had Loren mentioning that Grant, decades after he had proposed to her, phoned her unexpectedly one night to ask how she was doing, and to chat generally; and that he died the next day. (It was a bit of a shock: Grant had always seemed so alive and so timeless in the films of his I had watched, like The Awful Truth and Arsenic and Old Lace and Bringing up Baby; of course I knew he would have been in his eighties or nineties if he were still around, but to see the words coldly printed in the article was another matter.)

Then there was the Olivier piece, with a photo of him looking much younger than I had ever seen him, a still from Wuthering Heights where he played Heathcliff to Merle Oberon’s Cathy. (This piece also had a very exciting, possibly apocryphal account of David O Selznick seeing Vivien Leigh for the first time when she visited the sets of pre-production Gone With The Wind with Olivier – the burning of Atlanta was being filmed, Selznick saw her profile by the light of the flames – and knew she was Scarlett.) I have some of those issues stored somewhere, should look for them.

Here is the Lost Daughter/Power of the Dog piece. Written when it looked like Maggie Gyllenhaal had a good chance of being nominated as best director – sadly she wasn’t…

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Among the cinematic highlights of the past few years have been a number of films helmed by women (take Chloé Zhao’s much-feted Nomadland), and two of the more recent ones are heavily favoured for Oscar nominations this month. If, as seems probable, both Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Lost Daughter) are nominated for best director, it will be only the second time in Oscar history that two women will compete in that category. While Campion is a respected veteran, Gyllenhaal – better known as an actress – is a first-time director. But this gap in experience aside, some things are common to their films.

Both are immersive works that reward patient viewing – they demand (and deserve) viewers with the willingness to grasp the dramatic beats and the revelation of character that occur during scenes where not much appears to be happening at a plot level. Also, both stories are – in different ways – about parents and children, responsibilities and burdens, and about the societal expectations and gender straitjackets that can encase women and men.

Early in The Lost Daughter, during what’s meant to be a working vacation in Greece, the middle-aged protagonist Leda (Olivia Colman) sees a family crisis unfold: a young woman is looking for her little daughter who has vanished. The child turns out to be safe, but for a few dreadful moments it seems possible that she may have wandered deep into the sea. And we get flashbacks – through Leda’s perspective – to her own youth, and to a daughter, Bianca, who was similarly lost on a beach.

At this stage, it seems possible that Leda’s child might have been lost forever (a little while later we see her speaking on the phone to her other daughter; Bianca’s fate is still up in the air). But The Lost Daughter doesn’t centre around a single dramatic incident – the mystery at its heart is more measured, and concerns a woman’s reflections on her struggles and choices. In further flashbacks, we see the younger Leda feeling frustrated and tethered as she tries to balance her work life – she wants to feel valued in her work as an academic – with looking after her little daughters; in the present day, the older Leda says “I was selfish […] I was an unnatural mother.” But the film raises the question: is it so selfish or unnatural to want to be one’s own person, to dream for oneself, even while being a parent?

Filial relationships also lie at the heart of The Power of the Dog, in which the lives of a sensitive young man named Peter and his widowed mother Rose are affected when she remarries and her new husband’s brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is sneering and resentful of their presence. But an unusual dynamic develops between the seemingly predatory Phil and his main target, the “effeminate” Peter. We get glimpses of the former’s past, and realise that he is tormented by memories of a mentor who may have been both a father-figure and a lover. The hyper-masculine character soon turns out to have weak spots and demons, while the shy young man shows new dimensions too.

To reveal more about the plots of these two works would be a disservice, because in a sense they are both slow-burn suspense films – you might even call them psychological thrillers. However, more than an exciting climactic revelation, the suspense here involves what we learn about people, their relationships and their capabilities. And it’s hard to escape the feeling that the quietly observant quality of these films comes from the women’s touch behind the camera.