TV Review – My Brilliant Friend Season Two

My Brilliant Friend Season Two (HBO)
Written by Elena Ferrante, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Saverio Costanzo
Directed by Saverio Costanzo and Alice Rohrwacher

The subtitle of this season and its source material that the story is derived from is The Story of a New Name. This reflects the changes in Lila Cerullo’s (Gaia Girace) life and how one makes a name for oneself in transitioning from childhood into adulthood. Lila goes from being a Cerullo to a Carracci, and economically, she moves from poverty to comfortable working-middle class. For Lenu Greco (Margherita Mazzucco), she can leave their Neapolitan neighborhood but finds her roots as a child of poverty evident to her new acquaintances, causing others to view her as perpetually unrefined enough to ever achieve a higher status. Season Two is about the child’s transformation, whether having their dreams snatched away or transformed into something new.

The reality Lila & Lenu face now that they are young women is how little autonomy they have over their lives. It’s not just because of their gender. As Lila increases her wealth, she lauds it over Lenu, who goes to school and works to help at home. Lila doesn’t simply luxuriate in modern conveniences but truly struggles over the guilt she feels at how her new husband earns money through such crooked deals. For a time, Lila spends as much as she can to provide people in their community with help through food or resources. However, when Lila becomes jealous of Lenu’s freedom as an unmarried, educated woman, she leverages that money to try and put her friend beneath her.

Season two makes no attempt to hide the severity of being a poor working-class woman. The mother of a good friend is found in the bathroom after hanging herself, and this is a brutal reminder to Lenu of how suffocating life in her neighborhood can be. If the community turns on you, then you are expected to live out your days struggling to survive. Lila is desperate not to have a child and revels when she begins bleeding, a sign that a miscarriage has happened. A child is seen as the ultimate shackle; you have to help them survive, which means being beholden to a man in this system. 

The fates of these two young women are meant to be ironic. Lila flails and fights against everything imposed on her, but it does nothing; she ends up a man’s property. Lenu doesn’t put up much resistance and somehow, through luck, ends up attending high school and eventually university, the first of anyone from her neighborhood to do so. Why do these two end up in their respective places? There really is no good reason. Lila seems a natural with her spitfire personality to escape and do great things, yet she constantly struggles in life. Lenu seems like the passive wallflower who would just go along to get along, yet she attends the University Normale in Pisa, eventually penning a novel set to be published when the season closes. 

One of the core themes of this series is the happenstance of life. Lila should have pursued the same path as Lenu; it’s what our narrator always assumed was going to happen. In those first episodes, she tells how, as a child, she decided to shadow Lila and do whatever that girl did. Instead, Lenu does all the things we would have expected from Lila. The season even concludes with discovering a book Lila wrote as a child, which garnered effusive praise from their school teacher. Lenu is the one with a book about to be published. When she returns this book to her friend, Lila contemplates it momentarily before casting it into a fire and returning to her struggle. 

The strongest episode from a season of fantastic television was “The Kiss,” guest directed by Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. Lila has become sickly, so her husband sends her to the beach for the summer to recover. Lenu is asked to come along, paid for by Lila, who frames it as a way to use her husband’s money. Once they arrive, Lenu reconnects with her ongoing crush, Nino (Francesco Serpico), the poet’s son. Lila is reflexively jealous but becomes muddied as to whom she is jealous of. Is it Nino for taking Lenu’s attention so wholly & quickly? It could likely be envy about Lenu having the prospect of a better-educated & more refined lover than Lila’s brutish husband. That ambiguity is critical in the episode as the women begin a power struggle that reshapes them. 

Rohrwacher’s direction is luminous, capturing those moments during our transformation into adults where our perspective on the world suddenly becomes far more complicated. Lenu tries to sabotage Lila, who wants to keep up in the academic conversations, by giving her friend a collection of Samuel Beckett plays and claiming these are considered easy. Lila quickly learns that her friend has done her dirty, but being who she is, she burrows into the work, able to discuss it later with Nino. This causes him to fall in love with her, not Lenu.

Lila describes the plot of “All That Fall,” which follows an elderly woman as she journeys down a country road. She’s on her way to meet her blind husband at a train station but, along the way, meets various other characters. We learn that this woman is very abrasive and enjoys provoking others. Once at the station, her husband’s train is late, and she speculates what could have happened. When he does arrive, the woman is cold and distant as they make their way home. Lila focuses on the idea that life is lived more when we are deprived and how it intensifies life as we remove our senses. What happens in this scene is Lila’s seduction of Nino right in front of Lenu.

“The Kiss” is an episode that hits like a freight train, the upending of so many relationships in the series. Our two leads’ acting is phenomenal and shows how far beyond their young ages they are operating as performers. The emotions and themes are so rich & mature. We see Lenu process what must feel like an insurmountable level of emotional grief & disappointment, but it’s done in a way that feels true to what we all experience. This type of heartbreak is often done in private, hiding oneself away and letting it rush through you, coming to know its every intimate sting and then moving past it.

What Lenu does in reaction is so dark, yet I can see the logic of it from her point of view. She feels a desire to damage things, and she certainly does. Lila also has a penchant for leaving a trail of destruction in her wake, and her relationship with Nino is no exception. By the end of this season, the two friends are further apart than they have ever been. Lenu’s life seems on a trajectory of rich conversation and artistic fulfillment. Lila appears to have no options other than fighting to maintain her independence in a world where women are punished for such things. The path ahead will undoubtedly be interesting and has me wondering how much of these women’s friendship survives to the present day.