The Brilliant Friend 3 and the shocking ending of Lenù

The article contains spoilers on the seventh and eighth episode of The Genial Friend

Since the first season of The Brilliant Friend we were convinced that Lenù would live a life in constant balance between madness and despair, walking on a very thin thread like an expert tightrope walker. Where Lila was stormy, Lenù was a safe haven; where Lila collapsed, Lenù remained standing so as not to disappoint the many people who were around her and who expected to find in her an example to follow, the linearity opposite to her marginalization. The seventh and eighth episodes of History of those who flee and those who remain they showed us, however, that at the last minute Lenù chose to take his train and derail ittrying to follow a path that no one, including herself, would have imagined for her: that of betrayal, of the header, abandonment and the promise of a life that has the scent of freedom, but also of insanity. She has been since she, as a child, she met the little one Nino Sarratore at Cappuccio’s bedside that the little girl had a feeling of fascination and attraction for him, convinced that sooner or later fate would kiss her allowing her to build something together with him. In between, however, there were Donato Sarratore and Lila, her brilliant friend who managed to snatch the illusion of that daydream by inserting Nino into her net.

The anger and desperation for having lost him forever was followed by the resignation that allowed Lenù to start over away from the district and with the promise of a full and safe existence, with a man, Pietro Airota, at her side, and two little girls, Adele and Elsa, whom she would grow up showering them with the love she always felt she didn’t receive from her mother, gruff and lame. It didn’t take long, though, before we saw Nino knock on his door again, rekindling in her that light capable of making her see a gash in that bubble of loneliness and self-pity into which she was convinced she had fallen after her marriage and moving to Florence. As she seemed to take control of her again, publishing a pamphlet on how the male imagination has always imagined women, “Instructing and molding them” following the idea they had made of real women, Lenù fell because of a boy who never grew up and who has always shown a toxic and destructive narcissism for all those who have had the misfortune to share a piece of life with him. “You have made up your mind” is the joke that marked the collapse, sucking Lenù into a spiral from which she was unable to free herself, asking for certainties, savoring, for a moment, the dream she had caressed as a child.

“Tell me that you love me” she did nothing but repeat Lenù to Nino to confirm to herself that she had succeeded where Lila had failed, holding in her hands a love that she had not been able to arouse. Hence the decision, forced by Pietro himself, to shatter his life and run away with Nino, not without first collecting in silence as a warning from Lila who, once she heard the news on the phone, could not help but ask the friend if she was crazy. “I thought you could live a beautiful life for me too”“Do you screw everything up for that one?”, “Don’t do it”, “It will suck you and then leave you.” Although those words frightened her, Lenù did not give up, greeting the girl and welcoming the woman she managed to become. The finale of the third season of The Brilliant Friendproduced by Fandango, The Apartment, Fremantle and Wildside in collaboration with Rai Fiction and HBO Entertainment, prepared the ground for what will be the grand finale of the quadrilogy, showing us the ultimate fate of Lenù and Lila dragging their story to the present day, reconnecting us directly at the beginning of the very first season, when Rino telephones Lenù in the middle of the night and tells her that Lila, his mother, has been missing for two weeks cutting his face off all the photographs, as if it never existed. The wait for the fourth and final season of The Brilliant Friend it may still be longbut the certainty of seeing Alba Rohrwachernarrator of the series as well as companion of the director Saverio Costanzo who directed the first two seasons, in the role of Lenù, inherited from the talented Margherita Mazzucco, can only reassure us and make us hope for the best.

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