The most heartbreaking scene of the third season of The Brilliant Friend arrives in the middle of the fourth episode, when Lenù, disappointed to have discovered that Pietro’s mother did not like her second novel, calls Lila to find out what you think.
After all, Lila’s judgment is the only one that Lenù trusts, and that’s why lifting the phone is a superhuman effort for her, a round with herself from which she could have emerged victorious or defeated. There and then Lila, who in the meantime has decided to resume her life there where it all began, or in the district, reassures her and tells her that the book is beautiful, it can be read and it is, in its own way, compelling, but Lenù , who has always been used to recognizing gold from junk, doesn’t bite: “Tell me the truth”he tells her imperiously before collecting the answer he never wanted to hear: Lila didn’t like the novel one bit just as she hadn’t liked the first one, the one that had opened the doors to good lounges and social acceptability.
“This is not you, Lenù”, her brilliant friend tells her while Lenù cries, ready to admit that everything she wrote and thought was a direct emanation not of her creative drive, but of what Lila would have written and thought.
Margherita Mazzucco, Gaia Girace and the director Daniele Luchetti
The sense of defeat that strikes Lenù’s little body, limp from sciatica that makes her walk lame and worn out by too many sleepless nights to look after little Adele, does nothing but weigh on the heart of a girl who thought she had everything and, instead, realizes she has nothing. Seeking perennial approval for everything from book to housekeeping, Lenù sinks, crushed once again by Lila who, albeit at a distance, continues to exercise a dark spell on her who transforms her into an inanimate tank moved only by the desire to show her that she has made it, that she has had everything that as a child she dreamed of from afar, bringing her to hold in her hands the happiness that her brilliant friend will never savor. As well as when they were little and read Little Women in the square of the district, Lenù and Lila continue to hurt each other without really realizing it: it happens when Professor Galiani invites them to her house, treating Lenù as a failure and Lila as a virtuous example of resistance, but also when Lenù communicates to Lila the joy of being pregnant and the latter ruins her square by telling her that “everyone tells each other about life as it suits them “.
Lila and Gennarino
This very ferocious phrase is enough to crumble the bubble of happiness that Lenù had built, starting to experience motherhood not as the blessing that her mother had described to her, but as a misfortune that will curtail all his efforts to escape from the ward to build a full life. Lenù is so focused on moving forward that she shakes off the urban and human misery of the neighborhood that she gave birth to and does not realize the harm she causes.
The scene of her marriage to Pietro, with her parents forced to live an ambush in that den of intellectuals where they show themselves tremendously uncomfortable, is perhaps one of the most beautiful of the entire saga of The Brilliant Friend: see Immaculate Conception, played by a great Anna Rita Vitolo, watching her daughter Lenù sucked into that quadrille of handshakes and fake kisses is for her a reason for pride but also for sadness: Lenù does not turn to look at her, does not seek his gaze and does not even make sure if he is well. She immaculate, she knows that, by now, her daughter has taken off towards a full existence, but she ignores what we, in our hearts, know: that Lenù, as long as he confronts Lila, will never be happy. And that’s what it is History of those who flee and those who remain, the third chapter ofBrilliant friend produced by Fandango, The Apartment, Fremantle and Wildside in collaboration with Rai Fiction and HBO Entertainment, it shows us with absolute and unrepeatable vividness.
Other Vanity Fair stories that may interest you:
The Brilliant Friend 3Margherita Mazzucco: “Not just a good girl”
The Brilliant Friend 3Giovanni Buselli: “The important thing is to breathe”
The Brilliant Friend 3: Lila and Lenù, protagonists of a masterpiece
Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco: «Our last season of The brilliant friend“
Source: Vanity Fair

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