Photo: Eduardo Castaldo/HBO
In preparation to recap this season of My Brilliant Friend, I reread The Story of the Lost Child. Though I remembered many of the pivotal plot points — the earthquake, for example — I did not remember how shocking Nino’s infidelity was, even if unfaithfulness is his modus operandi. When I got to that part in the book, I let out a full gasp on the subway — the hand over mouth, murmuring under my breath, nearly missed my stop kind. Particularly because of my disappointment with the show’s earthquake depiction, I’d been looking forward to seeing how Bispuri and her team would tackle Nino’s despicable behavior. I liked that they tuned into the same wavelength as last week’s frenzy over Immacolata’s hospital admission. The continuity is especially astute in that the doubts on Lenù’s mind leading up to that afternoon turn out to be all true, if not worse than what she imagined. Using the same visual language to connect the incidents foregrounds the mechanic of the plot, which keeps driving forward, no matter how much Lenù might want to turn the other cheek.
Last week, Lenù was already beginning to admit that things with Nino might be worse than she thought, but the demands of her life make it almost impossible for her to reconsider her arrangement. She has been spending a lot of time at the clinic with Immacolata, whose condition has worsened to the point of inspiring final thoughts, conversations, and requests — or rather, demands. Of her sons, she demands that they take the job Lila has found for them in Baiano. If they love her so much, they’ll do this for her and let her die in peace. Of Marcello, she demands matrimony: he must marry her daughter Elisa. Lenù can’t understand why her mother would force her brothers out from under the Solaras’ grip and let Elisa take shelter there, but Immacolata gives her a knowing look, as if she’d gotten a hold of some grand divine plan and knew exactly how all of this mess would turn out. Between Lenù and her mother, there remains a surprising warmth, a renewed joy at being close. Dede and Elsa visit, and Lenù considers how quickly and unsparingly time goes by.
While Lenù sleeps with Imma on a chair next to her, Immacolata takes a few last gasps for air and dies as peacefully as possible. It’s sad, but there’s something hopeful about the way the relationship between mother and daughter heals before Immacolata passes, a reminder that for two people to forgive one another, all that’s needed is the will to do so. Both Pietro and Nino attend the funeral, as do the Solaras — in fact, all of the neighborhood’s old faces are there. One is Fernando Cerullo, Lila’s dad, who brings an awful vibe to the function. He tells Lenù he’s sorry for her loss, but “this is who we are, neighborhood people who are born and die. We can’t fool ourselves that we’ll become who knows what,” no matter how much she and Lila delude themselves that they can somehow escape that binding fate. It’s true that everyone dies, but that a person can never be more than their wretched fate is depressing.
There is another, perhaps more generous, way to interpret Fernando’s hard truth: people seldom change. If Immacolata softened towards the end of her illness, she only spared Lenù the last bits of her wrath. Lenù’s own bewilderment at the impossibility of life with Nino isn’t enough to change the blind faith she has in him, which she has harbored since childhood and cultivated like an essential part of her personality. Lila, for her part, doesn’t give an inch. While Lenù is dealing with the end of her mother’s life, Lila is bringing into the world a new one: she enters labor while Lenù is in the hospital, shortly before Immacolata’s death. Mirroring Lenù’s own steps some weeks earlier, she leaves the baby in the cradle and asks the neighbor to watch her. In the dynamic between the two women, Lila is the one often associated with strength, but when dealing with pregnancy, she is defenseless. She flags down strangers on the street to give her a ride, but Enzo arrives just in time to take her to the hospital. On the delivery table, she seems possessed: “Cut open my belly, bitch!” she barks at the nurses. As if confirming Gigliola’s accusation of some weeks ago, the nurses imply she is “holding back,” willing the baby not to be born. But at long last, little Tina comes along: a girl, which no one was expecting.
Even after the birth, Lila can’t find the beauty in delivering: it’s awful every time, and she swears she’ll never do it again. Lenù, for whom the creation of life is more natural, thinks her friend exaggerates. She wonders if Lila realized that she had given her daughter the same name as Lenù’s doll, the one that had been so instrumental in the beginning of their friendship. Lila marvels at the coincidence but insists it’s just that. The presence of the babies becomes a new pathway into a deeper, more mature intimacy between the two women that nevertheless retains the fierce loyalty of adolescence. When, in the clinic’s hallways, the gynecologist — Nino’s friend — describes Lila’s labor as “a fight against nature, a battle between mother and child,” Lenù becomes sharp: don’t talk about my friend that way. (It truly is inappropriate how comfortable this doctor is discussing Lila’s medical situation with another patient.)
Time goes by. We know because Lenù mentions that a year has passed between Immacolata’s death and the births of Imma and Tina, but also because she has gotten a haircut, which looks fabulous. As if Immacolata’s ghost decided to take up residence in her body, Lenù’s hip pain gets worse, and she develops a slight limp. In a midnight blue sequined dress, we see her hobbling around the apartment during a dinner party they are throwing for one of Lenù’s editors at the publisher. While she goes to check on Imma and get dessert for Dede and Elsa — Rum baba! Exciting news for Elsa, who has won my heart with her voracious appetite — Nino schmoozes with the editor, Enrico. He is forcefully pitching him a collection of essays that tackles the robotization of Fiat and its role in advancing capitalism. He is passionate about reform: the system must be changed from the inside out, and as such, someone — him, obviously — should rise within the ranks of power. Though Enrico’s wife looks dutifully charmed, the man himself is made uncomfortable by Nino’s obnoxiousness and the bluntness of his ambition. Finally, he tells Nino it’s not a good time for essays and turns to Lenù instead. Can he schedule her book for fall publication?
Lenù falters. Fall is too soon; she won’t be ready yet. The snake that he is, Nino butts in: he is a fast writer; if Enrico asked him for a book by October, he would have it. Lenù looks nauseated, which I think is an important step in her disillusionment with Nino. If before she admired his ability to debate and convince others of his own intelligence, now his hubris seems vulgar and egoistic. She’s come a long way from being smitten by a guy who gets booed at conferences. Enrico warns her that readerships must be cultivated: if she doesn’t publish more, people will soon forget about her existence. Finally, she agrees to meet his fall deadline. They toast to the good news. Having gotten what he needed, Enrico and his wife take their exit, leaving Lenù to contemplate how on Earth she is going to get a manuscript ready for publication in just a few short months.
Lenù speculates that Adele’s hands are all over Enrico’s ambush: behind the scenes at the publishing house, she’s trying to back Lenù into a corner. She knows that it’ll be hard for Lenù to find the time to write: she has to look after Dede and Elsa on top of nursing an infant and taking responsibility for the house. Nino, the big talker that he is, won’t lift a finger to help, and though Pietro is more involved now than he’s ever been before, he is still in Florence, and Dede and Elsa’s life is in Naples, for better or worse. Spiraling, she throws all of this in Nino’s face. In fact, she is disgusted by her situation. She sacrifices everything for him — surely he never has to worry about finding the time to work — and he can’t even separate from Eleonora. He pleads with her that this is why he hired Silvana, the housekeeper, so Lenù can focus on writing, but women know all too well that domestic labor isn’t just cleaning and cooking. Silvana doesn’t do homework with the girls. Dede and Elsa overhear the fight from the threshold of their bedroom door, which ends at a standstill.
“Don’t you want to prove everyone wrong?” Enrico had asked her; “everyone,” in this case, probably meaning Adele. But the fight with Nino galvanizes her. She should prove her former mother-in-law wrong and her late mother right: the discipline that has always ensured her life would move forward is now going to help her produce a novel, and a good one, in just a few months. The hyperfocus that she refined since childhood had all too easily been employed towards her life with Nino, and now it is time to recenter and get herself back. Gradually, she realizes that the theater of her life with him is not enough, and she begins to pull back the curtains. When Nino gushes over Enrico’s wife, she wonders if it is possible that, in his eyes, a stupid woman exists. Who does it benefit, this pretense that women are always better than men? Surely it doesn’t help raise the children or run the house. It’s just another way of objectifying women, making them into statues to be admired. Has he ever met a woman, flesh and blood? Has he ever met a bitch? Looking all solemn, Nino nods yes: Lila. It’s a rare funny moment in the show; Lila is a bitch.
One morning, Lenù leaves Imma with Silvana while she takes Dede and Elsa to school and Nino sleeps. On her way home, before stopping by the store to get diapers, she wonders at the distance between the boy she loved in adolescence and his adult version. She muses that the definitive break between the two figures “was generated by his love of Lila.” Lenù remains opaque on how that worked exactly, but I take the difference to mean that if, while with Lila, Nino glimpsed a world whose center was not him, and that world crumbled once they broke up, now he is careful never to let himself out of his own sight. At least in this one unexpected way, Nino and Lenù have mirrored experiences of young love: the disappointment that resulted from it was so formative that it rippled through adult life, changing the way they saw themselves and each other.
In Ferrante’s epic, no desire is small enough to come and go without leaving a trail of repercussions. This is where it touches on melodrama: ungoverned feelings are the ruling force that drives the story’s characters into one corner or the next, alternately saving or condemning them. When, at the beginning of the episode, Alfonso tells Lenù of his struggle with his sexual orientation, he describes being gay as an unnameable interior force, something that must be confronted and tamed by the power of will. The person who taught him to do that was Lila — this, more than just an aesthetic guide, is what she gave him. He needed not only to be honest with himself — Alfonso had known since childhood that something was different about him — but to live honestly, following the path set by those unruly feelings. By blowing up the drama of human relationships, Ferrante gets at the true scope of emotion in a person’s life, particularly one that is entangled with others. It’s enhanced because it’s fiction; but I can remember more than one time when I felt like my world would collapse if I was forced to accept what I didn’t want to believe about someone I loved.
It’s only by recognizing the sheer power of a formative desire in Ferrante’s world that the imposing role Nino has in Lenù’s life makes any sense; in fact, it’s the same logic that explains the enormousness of Lila. When Bispuri drags out Lenù’s arrival at home, seeing Imma alone in her cot, the apartment is eerily quiet before she finds Nino having sex with Silvana in the bathroom — that is a match to the force of Ferrante’s prose. Nino catches Lenù’s eyes through the door, but before he can utter a word, she’s already slammed the door, grabbed Imma, and gotten the hell out of there. Lenù doesn’t remember to take a diaper for Imma, and she only realizes her daughter is naked from the waist down once Imma has peed on her jeans in the car. Lenù cries, struggling to make sense of the person Nino is versus the person she had so wished him to be. What connected the boy she loved in childhood with the adolescent that swooned Lila in Ischia and the man who resembles, all too disturbingly, his rapist father? We see flashes of Lenù’s miserable time in Ischia alternated with her struggle to keep things moving: picking up Dede and Elsa from school and making sure someone is holding tightly onto Imma in the car. I thought using those images from past seasons was well deployed — they speak to the advantage of adapting this story into television. If this whole sequence had been compressed into a movie’s one or two hundred minutes, the flashbacks would’ve felt cheap, but here, with all the time that has gone by, they feel like history.
With her three daughters in tow, Lenù takes shelter at Lila’s. There, she finds out that Nino had already called Lila hoping she could convince Lenù to brush the whole thing off. “This is how we live today,” he argued absurdly, and Lila hung up on him. “What do I do?” Lenù asks Lila. The only thing there is to do: leave him. Knowing that hurting Lenù by telling her this might be the only way to convince her to let go of Nino for good, Lila finally tells her what she’d been keeping secret all along, those hints and side comments that Lenù had been paranoid about and whose importance evaporated when the earthquake struck. Nino pursued Lila relentlessly before he took up with Lenù — and after. Lenù’s worst fears about the hospital were all true: there, he told Lila that he was only with Lenù to be closer to her. The babies cry loudly. Lenù covers her ears with her hands. She looks as if the ground beneath her has just cracked right open.
