My Brilliant Friend ends as began: with an elderly Lenù (Elisabetta De Palo) getting a phone call from Gennaro (Alessio Galati) that Lila had disappeared. By this stage, he had gotten used to her disappearances and her wanderings. But the days had unspooled into two weeks and panic had fully set in. Lenù is calm and collected, albeit angry, and that calmness makes complete sense at the close of a story as it conveys, more than anything, the culmination of this friendship at the heart of the story.

Lila (Irene Maiorino) confesses to Lenù (Alba Rohrwacher) that she wants to disappear. It is the culmination of a life that has brimmed with resilience and suffering. Even the moments of joy and living that Lila experienced came with an internal struggle allowing her to be vulnerable enough to live in the first place. But after Tina’s disappearance, that vulnerability became too terrifying and so she closed that door with the irony that in doing so, she closed the door to living herself.

Lila, in the absence of having power, had to fight and seize it. Her struggle to maintain that power in some element defined her in a way that anyone who is marginalized can recognize, but she was also incapable and unwilling to do so quietly. She was determined to leave her mark in defiance of a society that sought to erase her identity at every turn. So she does, as Lenù says dryly, overdo it in what is arguably her life’s most consequential decision up until that point. Living on her own terns had become impossible so she decided to disappear on her own terms.

In her collected anger at her best friend’s disappearance, Lenù breaks her promise and writes a story about the most meaningful relationship of her life. One day, upon her return to her apartment in Turin, she finds a package in her mailbox. She unravels the rough packaging to find, in what we take away as Lila’s last communication with her best friend, the two dolls from their childhood, from more than fifty years ago.

At first, Lenù feels that perhaps this return was an indicator of Lila’s anger that her life story had been published. That it was a symbol of Lila’s decision to terminate their friendship. But as Lenù sat there, she realized that perhaps it was something different. Perhaps she thought about that moment where the two of them had their last conversation in Napoli. I teared up when Lila apologized to Lenù and professed her genuine desire for her best friend to have nothing but a thriving life for the remainder of it. I sobbed when Lenù embraced her best friend and Lila smiled in what must have been her first real smile since Tina’s disappearance. I bawled when Lenù looked back and Lila rushed forward to embrace her friend and thank her for their friendship. It was arguably her greatest act of vulnerability in her entire life and it is the act that made Lenù realize that with her return of the dolls, Lila had shown herself at last. And because she had done so, Lenù would never see her again.

There has been a lot written about what makes Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels so deeply powerful and perhaps what I’ll say her is a regurgitation of some of that. For me, it was from that first moment where the story eschewed so much of what we expect from television in the prestige and now in the prestige and streaming era. When the camera eschewed mere voyeurism and took so much care to portray the complex dimensions of everyday life with a lyricism and poetry often reserved for stories that never come close to the everyday lives of ordinary people, especially two women in an impoverished neighborhood. When in its first hour, it refused to define its leading characters with nothing but a deep respect for their experiences even as children.

There is often a rhythm that I found deeply, deeply moving and impactful, where the story eschewed the traditional narrative and character arcs we come to expect from serialized television. They’re still there, of course, but they come into crystal focus at the story’s ultimate ending and that sense of confidence speaks to something else that made the story so enrapturing and emotionally poignant.

As a writer, I deeply felt Lenù’s narration of her past in which she looks back with the clarity and muddling nature of time and tries to parse how moments both small and large and everything in between shaped who she became. As a melodramatic writer myself – albeit of different identities than Lenù – her desire to parse through those moments felt deeply relatable. Am I becoming someone I want to be? Am I becoming someone who others want me to be in spite of my ardent refusal to do so? Will I ever be able to construct a life of meaning and if I can’t, what is my artistry worth?

Lenù has answers to some of those questions, but she is also mature enough to realize that some questions will never have answers. But what you can do, as a person and an artist, is live life as a constant conversation with learning – about the world, about others, about yourself. Sometimes that conversation is going to be overshadowed by how others perceive you, by their expectations you have convinced are your own, by the world whose grandeur is often matched by its cruelty. As you grow older, you’ll get better at having that conversation on your own terms, in your own identity, in relationships you fulfill as who you are as a constantly evolving person. And perhaps, how as a person and artist, that is the very most you can be and how that, for a fulfilling life, is more than enough.

Notes:

– I love love love this nearly flawless show and it has been a privilege to write about it for you all.
– I love how Lila’s truths burrow into Lenù’s mind as truth but Lenù by this stage of adulthood has become comfortable speaking those truths in her own view and voice
– Nino (Fabrizio Gifuni) has always been a piece of shit whose rhetoric is never matched with conviction and I love how that comes to the forefront in the finale through the prism of class. I’ve also rarely wanted someone to slap a man as hard as I wanted Lenù to smack Nino at that restaurant
– Carmen’s (Lucia D’Ambra) revelation that Lila picked a random girl’s grave for Tina because it at least had dates of birth and death broke my heart
– A shoutout to Laura Bispuri for her impeccable direction of this entire final season
– Another to the casting department for this show, who fucking nailed it every season
– And another for Max Richter’s sublime scoring for this entire show
– In season two, there’s a gorgeous sequence where Lenù (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila (Gaia Girace) were always divided by a division within a mirror. Here that’s mirrored beautifully by the framing of both their beings and reflections together without that division separating them
– Loved how the young man who Lenù and Enzo (Pio Stellaccio) met in Bologna was so openly and vividly stylized as queer. I’d also metaphorically kill for the views of the city from his apartment
– Elsa (Dominique Donnarumma) from the book looking so much like a younger Lenù was a great touch. That it was also her who had the best understanding of Lenù and Lila’s friendship was another great note.
– Airport sequence was excellent, simple yet elegant
– Nino’s arrest? Sometimes there is justice, you know
-Lila cutting herself out of all her photos is the perfect note on how she would disappear when she decided to do so

Quotes:

– “The state? Do you know what the state really is? It’s a bunch of crooks, ministers who are friends with criminals in jail, crooked cops and judges, intelligence agencies that welcome fascists.” LILA CERULLO 2028!
– “You’re looters who make laws against other peoples’ looting.” LENÙ GRECO 2028!
– “I think day and night about what I want to write.” / “You’re so passionate when you speak, Lenù. You live in the world you’ve chosen, it absorbs you completely.”
– “You always inside, shore, prod.”
– “To write, you need to have the desire for something to survive you and I don’t even have the desire to live.”
– I’m so glad we’ve been friends all this time.” | Smile | “And that we still are.”
– “Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps and it for want it to last you must learn to avoid them. I did so on that occasion, too. In the end, I had only run into yet more proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, of how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, of how it still endured and would endure forever.”