TV Review – My Brilliant Friend Season Four

My Brilliant Friend Season Four (2024)
Written by Elena Ferrante, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Saverio Costanzo
Directed by Laura Bispuri

I was skeptical going in. The cast of the show was going to be changed. It made sense. These were meant to be people living through their 30s and into middle age. Keeping on actors who were mainly in their early to mid-20s would make that hard to pull off. Metaphorically, it makes sense. For a long time, it is difficult to see ourselves as adults, so our self-perception is still that of a child. Then, one day, we suddenly realize we are adults due to a single event or a series of them. That child hasn’t really been around for a long time. Season four manages to pull this off, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t missing Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco. 

Season four, subtitled “The Story of the Lost Child,” begins in the late 1970s as Lenu (now played by Alba Rohrwacher) sees her writing career take off. She’s in a relationship with Nino (Fabrizio Gifuni), who promises he’ll leave his wife…when the time is right. Yet Lenu also wants to be a good mother to her daughters, Dede and Elsa, whom she left with her husband before running off with Nino. She takes back custody of the children and eventually settles in Naples.

This return home brings Lenu directly into conflict with her past. Lila (now played by Irene Maiorino) has a successful computer business that local businesses have come to rely on. Her rivalry with the Solara brothers continues, but she’s married to Enzo and raising her son. Life seems to have found a kind of equilibrium. But as things have always been in the lives of Lenu and Lila, the calm is followed by drama. But even that won’t last forever until something happens that keeps this cycle from resuming.

Things are different in more ways than the cast for this final season. We don’t get much Lila until the second half. The first half of the series is tightly focused on Lenu and Nino’s doomed romance. She is still clinging to the delusion that he will make an honest woman of her. That creates strife between Lenu and her mother, Immacolata, who is nearing the end of her life. There’s also the nagging question as to whether Lila still holds feelings for Nino, which brings out a tremendous insecurity from Lenu. 

What season four does so well is make each episode feel like a mini-movie. So much love and care is put into the production of each chapter this season. The actors have been given strong scripts that take advantage of their talents. The one area where some might get annoyed is with the pacing. Season four covers the largest amount of time in the series, from the late 1970s to the present day. Things speed up tremendously in the last couple of episodes, with children becoming adults in the blink of an eye. 

I argue in favor of the sped-up pacing as thematically appropriate. One of the phenomena I’ve experienced since entering my 40s is a drastically accelerated sense of time. Some of this is partly due to how the pandemic has altered the way I feel time, but it is also part of the psychological time compression everyone experiences as they age. A day feels like nothing now, and I can barely believe 2024 is ending. Didn’t it just start? That sensation of time as sand slipping through your fingers is an essential piece of My Brilliant Friend sticking its landing.

What became clear to me the closer we got to the finale was that this whole story is the origin of the friendship/rivalry between those two old ladies in your community. Growing up in a small Southern town, I can definitely remember my awareness of older people who didn’t like each other and the sense that there was a story behind it. Without signaling that from the start, My Brilliant Friend reveals itself to be that sort of a story. By the end of the series, I could see Lenu and Lila partially from their children’s perspective, these two mysterious women who had a lot between them that just was never going to be said in the presence of others.

You might notice when the show reaches its ending that there are still many loose ends, stories left unresolved. Lila comments on this during a beautiful final monologue from Maiorino. To wrap everything up neatly is what you find in badly written novels. This embrace of ambiguity that so much of our lives won’t make sense upon reflection, that at our moment of death, we’ll likely still have more questions than answers, is something I wish we saw more of. I’ve noticed how uneasy people are with uncertainty. I’m guilty of that kind of anxiety myself from time to time. Yet, to be alive is an extremely uncertain thing. Much of it relies on the good or bad luck of where you were born. 

The standout for me here was Maiorino’s performance as Lila. She had obviously watched Girace in the role and studied her. Instead of simply impersonating, the actress clearly thought about what this person would be like as she matured. There are those moments where Lila disapproves of Lenu’s choices but won’t say it outright, so she tightens her mouth and delivers short, terse answers. The first time I saw Maiorino doing this, I could immediately see Girace in the performance. It was such a lovely way of keeping the continuity of the character while changing up the actors.

The final moments of My Brilliant Friend do not provide plot closure. Lenu is unable to have that. She is a writer, so she can only reflect and write down what she thinks and feels. Her friendship with Lila shaped her more than most things in her life, but that friendship cannot be reversed because of their age and geographic distance. It has grown and changed, too. All we can do is live and treat the people we encounter with kindness. Beyond that, there’s little else we have control over as individuals. We watch children grow up and start their lives. We watch people who had always been there become frailer until they pass. We try to apply meaning where, in fact, there is none. Just things happening and people reacting. Yet somewhere inside all of that is the beauty & tragedy of life.