Time is such a funny thing. You can stand at the exact same precipice you stood at years ago and you’ll feel it: the inherent lie that time tells you, sells you – that it always moves forward.

Sometimes when you realize that lie, it’s disorienting in a way that yields a sense of comfort. This powerful pull of nostalgia that makes the lie not just palatable, but a pleasant surprise, perhaps even something that grounds you when you’re otherwise feeling unmoored.

I think of the moment when Lenu (Alba Rohrwacher) and Lila (Irene Maiorino) genuinely reconnect earlier this season and smile through a mutual tension. The moment when Lenu is walking through her old neighbourhood with her daughters and feels a pull from the place her life began.

Then there are those moments where that lie feels deeply destabilizing, unmooring, like life itself has betrayed you. As the story of My Brilliant Friend comes to a close, Elena Ferrante confronts a question so many of us find ourselves contemplating: how much has really changed?

It’s a question terrifying in its simplicity because it reinforces our knowledge that we are upon this earth for a finite time and one of the things that keeps us going is believing that, with the passage of time, things will change. But then, when things seemingly don’t change at all, we’re forced to think about how the passage of time has tricked us, so cruelly, and the consequential dread that maybe, just maybe, we lost the time we will never get back.

Lila using Lenu’s heft as a writer to satisfy her guilt and vendetta in a short-sighted fashion: How much had changed? The Solaras running the neighbourhood as if Michele’s (Edoardo Pesce) obsession with Lila and Alfonso (Renato De Simone) had never existed: How much had changed? Lila and Lenu, as adult women, on the receiving end of violence from men whose world was so vast within the confines of the neighbourhood: How much had changed?

A return of the old order, Antonio (Massimiliano Rossi) says glumly and there’s a truth to that. But there’s also a truth in that things have changed: it’s just wondering whether they’ve done so in a meaningful way, in a way that will create a tangible consequence in its wake. Lila and Lenu are adults, with children of their own, with an agency they did not entirely possess in their youths.

Lenu publishes a novel influenced by the realities of her neighbourhood and suddenly finds herself in the midst of everyone trying to claim her voice with prejudices of their own. She finds that especially in the voices of Northerners like her former mother-in-law who gravitate towards her book with a real zeal, eager to justify their prejudiced distaste towards Naples as a crime-ridden, filthy city.

So she exercises her agency through her voice, pushing back against that narrative. It’s a complicated city, she notes, a city that taught her the most, that helped make so much of who she is. It’s a city, in essence, that represents the contradictions weaving through Italy itself. A city whose essence runs through Lenu, through Lila, through the inherent lie of time itself. How much will it change? How much will it remain the same?

Notes:

– I’m not sure how real Alfonso’s story was in a tale that feels deeply autobiographical and I do appreciate how much care Alfonso’s narrative received this season. Nevertheless, Alfonso’s fate reeks of a “bury your gays” trope. I wish that maybe the show had taken a different route. It feels like a stain on an otherwise largely impeccable story.