The two new episodes finally offer us the key to fully understand the nature of the two protagonists.
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| Image Credit: HBO |
After a return and an adjustment due to the new casting, we are ready to dive again, with familiarity and passion, into the life of Lenù and Lila, with episodes 3 and 4 of My Brilliant Friend the last season of the series that adapts Elena Ferrante's tetralogy, famous throughout the world and already concluded in the broadcast for the USA on HBO.
My Brilliant Friend returns to a completely changed neighborhood
The happiest seasons of the series saw the neighborhood as a place of violence and ignorance, but also a safe place, where one had an identity, a certainty, and the possibility of existing in a small but comforting microcosm. Elena's return to her native places, in chapter 27, The Compromises, brings her back to a place that is now unknown. The woman finds her mother, her family, especially Lila, and they all live in a world that has changed considerably and become dangerous due to a modernity that has taken root there with its worst face. Elena finds herself catapulted, once again, into a new life, having to deal with unforeseen circumstances, but she also finds herself once again in the company (and shadow) of Lila. Her childhood friend has given an important turning point in her life, becoming a businesswoman and finding, we still don't understand how, a way to dominate the power of the Solaras, the neighborhood bosses who have tormented the girls since they were kids.
Lila is now a sort of good mistress of the neighborhood, a real "Godmother", powerful and rich, ruthless, but also good, generous, and compassionate, the only one to turn to for help. A position that seems to marry perfectly with the two souls of the woman, who has always lived of contrasts, of nobility of spirit and wickedness. And while Lila rises in the eyes of the viewer, Elena is confronted with the poverty of her life choices, continues to live as Nino's official lover, and even accompanies him on Sunday family visits, in which (supreme horror!) I meet again the filthy Donato Sarratore, Nino's father and, to all intents and purposes, his rapist.
The body as a narrative device
In these ambivalent circumstances, the two women will have to face a happy unexpected event: both become pregnant (with Nino and Enzo, respectively) and begin to share this transformative journey that brings them closer again, so much so that Lila becomes Dede and Elsa's "favorite aunt". The series then shifts again to the importance of the body inhabited not only by women, but also by what they generate, and, again, the two friends/enemies could not be more different in facing this journey (which they both know well, being already mothers). Elena is happy with her roundness, patient, serene, and tired. Lila is restless, without this unborn child as a foreign body, to be expelled, that “gets on her nerves”, or rather annoys her, to the point of thinking that there is something wrong with her…
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| Image Credit: HBO |
An earthquake that reveals the cracks in Lila and the solidity of Elena
The key to understanding this discomfort, and Lila’s entire personality, is offered to us in a moment of enormous generosity in the script, the following episode, chapter 28, Earthquake. If the previous episode had mentioned the Bologna Massacre of the summer of 1980, confirming, even in a marginal way, how much My Brilliant Friend is rooted in its social fabric, this second weekly episode takes us forward in time, to November, when there was the terrible Irpinia earthquake and the entire province of Naples was shaken, literally, with great violence. Lenù and Lila are alone, it’s Sunday, and the two friends in an advanced state of pregnancy decide to spend a lazy afternoon together, at Lila’s house, in the neighborhood, until the earth begins to shake (a touch of emphasis made the beginning of the first tremor coincide with Elena’s question to Lila: “What do you know about Nino?”).
The two women help each other and give each other strength, they manage to make their way to the road and the car, where they remain in search of shelter. And here, Lila has another of her crises, she once again experiences that “marginalization” that we witnessed in the first season, when in her eyes reality frays, the boundaries of things open up and let their visceral and irrational side come out, and nothing makes sense anymore. Irene Maiorino therefore embraces the responsibility of explaining, finally, Lila’s nature to the public and also to Elena, putting into words the famous passage from the novels: The only problem has always been the agitation of the head. I can't stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, and break.
But the screenplay does not stop at reporting the quote from the original, it goes deeper and in many ways explains better (something the book will never do until the last page) what the "Lila mystery" is, in a fit of purity and honesty, the woman confesses to her friend: "In me evil scores together with good", thus demonstrating to herself, Elena and the viewer all her specialty, but also her weakness. It is an intimate and epiphanic moment, in which we finally understand what the balance of power between the two is and how indispensable they are to each other to walk straight in a world continually swept by the waves of tragedy, violence, and male arrogance. An arrogance that in its external violence is fiercely opposed by Lila, but that in its psychological and subtle violence, represented by the very existence of Nino Sarratore (Fabrizio Gifuni), forces Lenù to succumb again.
My Brilliant Friend: The Story of the Lost Child also loses inspiration
The flash of generosity in the unveiling of Lila's personality is lost in a flat sea, however. The series seems to struggle to find that rough and painful, but also romantic and fairytale-like soul that had characterized it from the beginning. By now we are fond of Lila and Lenù and we want to know how their story ends and what the future has in store for them. We are even willing to put up with Alba Rohrwacher's miscasting because her voice represents a long and emotional bond with the show (it's not her fault, of course), but the direction and ideas, in this season, seem to be really distributed sparingly and we feel like we are heading towards the end of this story with tiredness and resignation.
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