My Brilliant Friend ends where it begins. After four seasons and six years, we loop around to the scene that opens the show: In the middle of the night, Lenù, now in her 60s and living in Turin, gets a call from Gennaro, who tells her his mother has gone missing. In the show’s opening sequence, Lenù rudely unloads on the desperate Gennaro the anger she feels toward her friend. Lenù and Lila hadn’t seen each other in years, but Lenù still perceives Lila’s disappearance as a personal slight. It’s in reaction to this apparent insult that Lenù begins writing the story that we read and watch — a betrayal of a promise she’d made to Lila long ago that she would never put her story to paper.
The world of My Brilliant Friend engulfs you so entirely that Lenù’s voice-over narration — always in the past tense — becomes a natural part of the story’s universe. The consciousness of the story is there for no other purpose than that it must be told. But in the final act, we are reminded that the writing we are experiencing is motivated by truth and spite. If we had gotten so used to Lenù’s voice that we’d become accustomed to taking her at her word, Ferrante reminds us in the last lines of The Story of the Lost Child that “life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.” After all these years, the relationship between Lenù and Lila is still a mystery: the yearslong rumination that became the Neapolitan Quartet yielded no clear answers, no definitive ending. Tina is gone, and now so is Lila — gone where, nobody knows.
When we open on “Restitution,” some time has gone by since Tina’s disappearance — Lenù wears a fabulous bob. Lila has all but lost every bit of will to keep going. She gives Lenù and her daughters the personal computer from her office at Basic Sight and tells Lenù that she is giving up the business: Enzo can either run it alone or sell it, but she won’t go back. And it’s not only the business that she’s giving up, but her relationship with Enzo, too — she wants to be thoroughly alone. Lenù encourages her friend to find things to be interested and involved in, but all Lila wants is to “waste time.”
When, shortly after the earthquake, Lila explained to Lenù her fear of dissolving boundaries, she tried to articulate the enormous willpower that it took her to live as part of the world. She has to make a Herculean effort for things to stay contained in their borders, and in the face of Tina’s disappearance, Lila simply lets go. People, things, emotions — they all merge together. What little inhibition she had before is now gone. Seeing on Lenù’s wrist Immacolata’s bracelet, which she had finally gotten back from the jeweler’s along with a posthumous note from Marcello — “I’m sorry,” it reads in a rounded, grammar-school script — Lila tells her it’ll bring bad luck. When Carmen comes over to tell them that Nadia has been arrested, frightened that Pasquale will now be caught for good and maybe even killed, Lenù and Carmen agree that it might be wiser for him to turn himself in to the authorities and go to jail rather than die. But Lila’s patience for compromise or moderation is short. In her estimation, Lenù and Carmen, her oldest and dearest friends, are both “stupid bitches” and “spineless chickenshits.”
The question of where Lila goes after she slams the door — and where she goes in general when she’s not at home, since without work, marriage, or purpose the contours of her life have become illegible — preoccupies Lenù in a foreshadowing of her final disappearance. Carmen is convinced that Lila has randomly picked out a girl’s grave in a nearby cemetery to grieve Tina, but Lenù thinks that’s just a morbid fantasy. Lila herself maintains that she just walks around the city, an affirmation that will be corroborated by Imma many years later. Already a teenager, Imma will tell Lenù that Lila has studied Naples with a historian’s zeal, learning the myths and legends that lurk underneath the old buildings, filling in every nook and cranny of the city with narrative.
For now, though, Lenù turns her attention elsewhere: to Dede and Gennaro, who steal romantic glances at each other. A main theme of this episode is that while Lenù was busy with her involvement with Nino, her career, and her attempt to understand Lila, her daughters’ lives went on, detached from their mother’s curiosity. Now that Lila isn’t around as much, Lenù tries to catch up with everything she missed. Over pizza one night, Lenù asks Dede point-blank if she’s in love with Gennaro. The answer is yes, though she’s not sure whether he feels the same way. But before Lenù can earnestly turn her attention to something happening in her daughter’s life — a part of motherhood that has consistently eluded her — the television news announces that Pasquale has been arrested.
This development preoccupies Lenù “more than Dede’s exams.” Pasquale’s charges don’t include the Solaras’ murder — for which Lenù and Carmen have become convinced he is responsible — and seeking to help her friend, Lenù makes an appointment with none but the Honorable Nino Sarratore. In the marbled halls of Parliament, their footsteps echoing, Nino makes a show out of his affection for Imma. What follows is a conversation gnarled with subtext. Lenù wants Nino to help Pasquale — who, unlike Nadia, refuses to collaborate with the authorities — but also wants to denounce the use of privilege as a path to impunity. When Nino tells Imma that if she ever has a problem in her school, she should call him, Lenù objects: she should learn how to take care of herself. But if the causal relationship between action and consequence is so important for Lenù, how come she is here, meeting with him, asking him to find a way for Pasquale?
Nevertheless, Lenù is disgusted by Nino’s politicking. By lunchtime, the subtext of their conversation erupts violently into the surface. Nino smugly tells Lenù that she has never understood anything about politics; she’s better off “playing with literature,” that small, unimportant pastime. The graying, spiteful Nino is finally his most honest self: the one who is not afraid to admit he will do whatever it takes, his convictions notwithstanding, to rise above others. Very well, that mentality lands him in jail. Years later, the Honorable Sarratore is arrested on corruption charges. The teenage Imma finds out on the news from where her father, it seems, never moved out after all.
But that’s later. When Lenù gets home after visiting Nino in Parliament, something much more urgent has happened. Lila tells her simply that Gennaro has left home. Lenù immediately worries that he took Dede with him, and she sighs in relief when she finds her daughter downstairs. But Dede is once again crying in a fetal position, and she shoves a note into her mother’s hands. It’s an apology from Elsa, who couldn’t help her feelings and has decided to drop out of school to … it’s not very clear what exactly Elsa and Gennaro plan to do (be actors? Start a band?), but they’re doing it away from Naples. Lila is so shocked that it was Elsa who left with Gennaro that it makes her laugh. But Lenù doesn’t think it’s funny — in fact, Lenù wants to call the police. Unlike Gennaro, Elsa is a minor, and she could report him for kidnapping.
Lenù goes apeshit. She goes through Elsa’s room, hoping to find a clue to where they might’ve gone, and in her investigation of the apartment discovers that Elsa has taken all of her jewelry and cash. In her anger, Lenù turns the blame onto Dede: how could she have been so stupid not to know that her miscreant sister would take everything she has? Dede finally coughs up the number of a guy whose house in Bologna she suspects they might have gone to, and Lenù decides to go there. She asks Lila to go with her, but after Lenù has threatened to call the police on her son and implied that the worst tragedy that could befall her daughter would be for her to make a life with Gennaro, Lila doesn’t feel like being with her much. Lila rubs it in Lenù’s face: Gennaro may be the uneducated junkie, but it is Elsa who betrays and steals.
It’s Enzo who goes to Bologna with Lenù. In one of the more unexpectedly moving sequences of the season, he speaks honestly about his own grief while shadows pass over his face. Since he was a kid working for his parents’ produce cart, Enzo has always been reserved, of a quiet but sturdy conviction and an unpretentious loyalty to those he loves. He is so sensitive that, even after opening up about his daughter’s disappearance, he shows extensive interest in Lenù’s life and her work. For his part, he tells her, he’s getting out of the neighborhood, looking for a job in Milan. His relationship with Lila is over, but he cares enough to ask Lenù to stay with her friend through what is sure to be a difficult old age. “It’s as if [Lila] has slid into the void left by our daughter,” he explains.
In Bologna, a vaguely intimidating kid with a punk-ish air about him proves nice enough as he lets Lenù and Enzo look around, but Elsa and Gennaro are not there. Enzo calls Lila, who tells Lenù to call Dede, who has news. Firstly, she has decided to move to the United States, where Pietro is now living, and study there since it has become clear that she cannot share a roof with her sister. Secondly, Elsa “that bitch” Greco, is at Adele and Guido’s house. What better place to abscond to than your grandparents’ bougie house, a place where the mere mention of your mother’s name elicits automatic rage?
The more Lenù has exerted herself in this cat-and-mouse chase, the more often she has tucked and untucked her button-down shirt from her skirt; she’s sweaty with the effort. When she makes it to the Airotas, Adele gives her a weirdly warm hug. The bratty Elsa has the gall to be wearing Lenù’s mother’s bracelet on her own wrist, and she throws a cartoonish, belly-down, legs-up-and-kicking tantrum once Lenù tells her that she has to come home. So, they settle on a deal: Elsa can stay with Gennaro at the Airotas for the summer, and when she returns to school in the fall, Gennaro can live with them in the apartment. It seems like an absurdly sweet deal to me and not an earned one; I thought Lenù was easy on Elsa, sparing her a talk about the way she betrayed her sister or about what she needs in order for home to feel like a refuge rather than a prison. Just the same way Lenù’s attention was easily turned from Dede’s exams, Elsa’s interiority — as closely as it might resemble the obsessive, single-minded passion that Lenù herself felt for Nino — doesn’t seize her attention as rapturously as Lila’s.
Whereas Lenù is limited in her ability to identify her part in Elsa’s misbehavior, Pietro is more perceptive. On the phone, he observes that neither of them have been able to provide their daughters with a continuous stream of affection that would make them feel secure in their attachment. Shortly before Dede leaves to join Pietro in the U.S., she hyperventilates at the dinner table. She seeks her mother’s lap for the first time since childhood, and though Lenù is pleased by this vote of trust and affection, she misunderstands its meaning. One thing about Dede is that she’s going to be real. “All you care about is Aunt Lila and work,” she tells her mother at the airport. “The real punishment for Elsa is to stay here.” Dede saves all of her warmth and tenderness for Imma; for Lenù there’s only a cold good-bye.
Lenù tells Lila tactlessly that “in just a couple of days [she has] lost both” her daughters. Not only are they not lost, Lila reminds her, Lenù should be happy that she has now gained a son — Lila’s own, who has decided to live downstairs for an indeterminate amount of time, even past the inevitable expiration of his whirlwind love affair with Elsa. Two years later, he’s still there, minding his business. Elsa has, like her older sister, moved to the United States, and Lila continues to have a close relationship with Imma, whom she takes around tours of the city. Gennaro tells Lenù that Lila spends all day at the computer … writing. The revelation nearly sends Lenù into a spin; last time Lila committed word to paper, all those years ago with The Blue Fairy, it changed the course of Lenù’s life. Now that she’s an established writer, could she weather another shift?
Lenù goes upstairs to talk to Lila. She needs, first of all, to tell Lila that the time has come for her and Imma to leave, and they are moving to Turin. Lila speaks fondly of Imma, and posits a theory she has long secretly held that Tina was taken in Imma’s place. When Tina was mistakenly identified as Lenù’s daughter on that magazine profile, the kidnappers might have believed that the author-mother would have ransom money, and when they realized they had the wrong kid, they just dropped the plan, leaving Tina to be lost forever. It rattles Lenù to think that somebody might’ve been after her daughter; or that Lila would’ve held something, no matter how buried, against Lenù in the matter of Tina’s disappearance.
The show adds a slightly melodramatic layer to this conversation — there’s no reason Lenù should know that this would be their last heart-to-heart, but we’re supposed to understand that it is. This creates a slight dissonance since, as audience members, we have only known what Lenù knows; being placed outside of her perspective feels jarring. Lenù suggests that Lila is saying those things about Imma and Tina as a punishment for her decision to leave Naples. But, for once, Lila doesn’t double down. Instead, she feels sorry: “Only in bad novels do people say and do the right things,” she says by way of apology. This is one of the ways in which the show signals to us that this is the two friends’ “ending” — we’ve never seen Lila so tame.
Lenù implores Lila to read whatever she’s written — if it’s a diary, a stream-of-consciousness ramble, or a story, it doesn’t matter; Lenù wants to read and publish it. But Lila brushes it off; she’s not writing anything. “In order to write, you have to have the desire for something to survive you,” she says ominously. “I don’t even have the desire to live.” Already she speaks about disappearing without a trace, which accounts for Lenù’s ability to later accept the way her friend falls off of the face of the earth. Lila apologizes about the magazine comment and about everything; she tells Lenù to go after better things in Turin, thanks her sincerely, and touches her face tenderly. They hug once — mechanically — and then another time, truthfully. “I’m so glad we’ve been friends all this time and that we are still,” Lila says.
Even though I felt like this moment was too neatly manufactured, I couldn’t help but cry a little, since the whole show has built up to this moment: a hug with no ulterior motive or calculation, a pure display of affection between two women who love each other. I was moved because I’m not a monster, but I still resented the grandiosity when the point of how this story ends is that finality of this kind — legible and satisfying — is an illusion. It’s while Imma and Lenù ride the train from Naples to Turin that the screen cuts to black and we’re taken to where we began: with a phone call from Gennaro warning Lenù of Lila’s disappearance.
I also resent this ending because it smooths over some of the messier implications in the book. In The Story of the Lost Child, after Lenù moves to Turin with Imma but before Lila disappears, Lenù publishes one more book after some years of fading into obscurity. Called A Friendship, it’s the story of Tina’s disappearance, a novella she writes during a rainy visit to Naples. The book is a huge success that rekindles Lenù’s long-dormant readership, and it infuriates Lila, who never speaks to Lenù again. Though Lenù tries to contact her over and over, Lila simply ignores her calls, so that by the time that Lila makes the conscious decision to evaporate, it had already been years since she’d been gone to Lenù.
One ordinary morning, coming home from walking her dog, Lenù finds in her mailbox a package wrapped with newspaper. Inside, there they are: the two dolls, Tina and Nu, that started everything. Lenù runs outside to see if she can still catch her — it couldn’t have been anyone but Lila that put them there. Lenù had believed since she was a child that those dolls were lost somewhere underneath Don Achille’s house, and because she is still mad at Lila, her first thought is that Lila has tricked and deceived her all of these years. But another way of thinking about it is that Lila loves her and wants her to be well; that sending the dolls is a demonstration of her affection for Lenù, which, though it may waver, will never falter. “Now that Lila has shown herself so clearly,” Lenù thinks, “I must resign myself to never seeing her again.” A single tear runs down Lenù’s cheek, but she smiles. It’s a relief.
