“I create a shield around me,” Lila (Irene Maiorino) told Lenù (Alba Rohrwacher), “every time I sense that someone or something has found a vulnerability within me.” When life throws one moment after another at you, refusing to give you a moment to breathe, it’s a natural response to build up layer after layer around you. “I will never be vulnerable again,” you tell yourself. “I will never be in a position to be thrown around and exploited again. I will be so formidable that nothing will pierce my shield.” You are tired of being hurt. You are tired of your agency being robbed from you. You are tired of living life on other peoples’ terms. It is a tragedy and blessing of life that one simply can’t live that way.

Tina’s (Maria Vittoria Miorin) disappearance is the thing that rocks everything out from Lila’s feet. I don’t know what that experience is and if there’s a divine power, I hope that it’s kind enough to never put me through that experience. Kids run around, Lila says calmly, thinking about the moment when she thought that she had lost Gennaro. Then the aftermath of that memory is rapidly replaced by the feeling that she had had in that moment. Then that feeling escalates and escalates and this time, she feels that something is deeply different.

It’s the unknowing that unmoors you. This wretched sort of chasm that pulls you constantly into disparate directions. One in which your heart convinces you that there is some hope, that you have to cling to it because you owe it to your loved ones to hold onto that hope. One in which your brain slowly tries to convince you to accept the perceived reality that the disappeared aren’t coming back. That someone has taken them. That maybe they’re no longer alive.

It’s a reality that refuses to morph into a desire, a desire that refuses to morph into reality. Disappearances are always a bit of both of those realities because they’re never singular. Shortly after Tina’s disappearance, Rino (Salvatore Striano) disappears and is found dead on an abandoned train following an overdose. And after that, the general wellspring of sympathy began to morph into what Lila and Lenù had seen during their childhood: a metamorphosis into abandonment. The neighbourhood was making Lila feel as if she was disappearing in her own right. As if they noticed her disappearing herself, inwards and inwards, wallowed out by grief, and decided that they should perhaps assist in her act of leaving herself behind.

Then the Solaras disappear in their own right. Suspected by many of being behind Tina’s disappearance, they galvanize a performance of looking for the child, a performance that no one in their right mind would buy. As time goes by and Lila fades into grief and communal abandonment, her sharpness rendered blunt for many, a sort of normalcy returns. But it takes a moment, as if so often does, for something or someone to exist in one moment and become invisible in the next. 

Their presence has been so ubiquitous throughout the entire series. In every chapter, in every significant moment the Solaras’ trenchant for corruption and power has been as ingrained into these characters and their stories as anything else. And it felt, so recently, as if a return to the status quo was what the story was offering. But in just a few shots, the two brothers lie dead on the street, bleeding out. What they were thinking in their final moments, who knows.

But as Lenù rushes to a Lila gripped with pain, there’s an excitement and rush to her voice. She feels that it is a moment of joy for Lila, who so desperately needs one, but it’s a moment of triumph for herself as well. Lila grins and through pain and gritted teeth announces her joy at the idea of her child returning to wreak her revenge. And Lenù, mired in surprise, triumph, and concern for her friend, wonders if, in the vacuum of this disappearance, what, if anything, would come forth.

Notes:

– Three particular technical notes this week: a) the sound work of grinding metal as Lila realizes that Tina has disappeared, b) the conversation between the two of them where it felt that both of their metaphysical and physical serves were intertwining in conversation with each other, and c) Lenù’s recreation of the Solaras’ assassination. Exquisite, exquisite work
– Irene’s face as she realizes that Tina has disappeared is one of the most precise and poignant moments of terror I’ve seen in recent memory
– Marcello (Lino Musella) buttoning his suit jacket right before the shot that kills him is such a pitch perfect character note for him to go out on