My Brilliant Friend Recap: Madwoman in the Attic
Usually, when a television drama that has been running for four seasons reaches its penultimate installment, there is a sense that things are wrapping up. Of all the Ts yet to be crossed in My Brilliant Friend, Lenù’s obsession with Nino is the most pressing. She is finally on the other side of her relationship with him, but if it’s frustrating to see Lenù dressing up for his visit and worrying about his feelings for Lila (and vice-versa), it also makes sense. At this point, her obsession with Nino is bigger than Nino himself. It has calcified into the foundation of her character. By the time we reach the end of this saga, Lenù’s feelings for Nino will not be resolved. There is no cure for a sick heart, definitely not in Ferrante’s universe, where desire burns down to an ember that lingers, waiting to be fanned and catch fire.
In the face of this episode’s two pivotal moments, though, the question of what to do about Nino becomes senseless. After a lifetime of internal turbulence, the environment finally catches up to Lila and Lenù, upending the last certainties they still had — and with it, our expectations of any neat, definitive ending. By the end of “The Disappearance,” the neighborhood’s universe seems uncanny: familiar but strange. No perceived normalcy can survive Tina’s disappearance and the death of the Solaras. Nothing, of course, but the people. The people are all still themselves. In order to gain any ground in this world, life in the neighborhood warns, you have to dig your heels in.
When Lenù sees Nino again, after months of silence, coming out of his swanky new Beamer with his swanky new suit and salt and pepper hair, she, mercifully, doesn’t stir. She had spent the morning getting herself and the girls ready for Nino’s visit, which he had to be coaxed into through a series of threatening phone calls to his secretary in parliament, so distant is the possibility that it could ever occur to him to visit his young daughter unprompted. For her part, Imma is indifferent to Papa’s visit. She’d rather play with Tina.
Lenù is combative. She wants Nino to show undivided attention to Imma and not waste time fussing over her, Dede, or Elsa (or Lila, it goes unsaid). As Lenù speaks, Nino makes a face as if he already knows and understands everything, like it’s beneath him to be explained to in this way, even though he has to be essentially physically wrested to come visit, let alone read the letter Lenù sent detailing the minutiae of Imma’s emerging daddy issues. But the inescapable truth is that Nino’s charms are irresistible for a young and impressionable mind (even sometimes a developed and sophisticated one). He brings books for Dede and Elsa and a bag full of gifts for Imma; when Tina, for once, is the odd one out, he takes a pen out of his jacket to give to her. Not one to miss the opportunity to show off, Tina writes her name perfectly on a notebook, inspiring Nino’s amazement and the unfortunate comparison: She’s just like her mother. In order to spare Imma, he has her “write” her name, too, and dutifully praises her scribbles. “Do you want to see the most beautiful car in the world?” He asks the four girls before taking them all for a stroll.
As she gets lunch ready, Lenù wonders about the potential vestiges of Nino and Lila’s feelings for one another, and in a callback to the hospital scenes — in which what Lenù imagined was happening between Nino and Lila in her absence turned out to be true — she manifests her fears. On the stradone, she finds Nino and Lila talking closely, the latter laughing and batting her eyelashes, Imma on her hip. The sight is so arresting that when Lenù calls out Nino’s name, her voice catches in her throat; Elsa, that menace, mocks her mother to her sister’s amusement. On a Sunday, the stradone is busy with movement. The sounds and sights of the families overwhelm Lenù’s already distorted senses so that by the time she poses the defining question, no one seems very worried at all. Where’s Tina? Lila first thinks she’s with Dede and Elsa, then tells Nino about a time when she lost sight of Gennaro for a few hours until she found him strolling along the street. While she warbles on, Enzo becomes increasingly uneasy. He exchanges looks with Lenù. The realization that something is wrong flushes Lila’s face gradually, and she retreats from Nino as if she were surrendering. In a daze, she starts looking for her daughter.
We find out more information on Tina’s disappearance from a television program that Enzo and Gennaro watch at home one week later. Though Lila is also technically looking at the TV, she doesn’t seem to be seeing anything. Unrecognizable faces from the neighborhood speak to the collective effort that has swept over the community to find little Tina. One popular, gruesome theory has it that a truck ran her over and then sped away, but what happened for sure, no one can tell. Despite the L’Espresso article detailing their corrupt business, the reporter notes, the Solaras have undertaken a massive effort to help locate the girl. Rino, Lila’s brother, Stefano, her ex-husband, and Gennaro have all been taken under questioning; her brother and son particularly for their association with the neighborhood’s unsavory characters. After being released, Stefano suffered a heart attack, though whether the two experiences are related remains unclear.
The authorities are conspicuously absent from our viewpoint — we never meet a cop, not on television or on the ground as the episode goes on. That absence only adds to the sense that the neighborhood is its own world apart from Italy, Europe, or planet Earth, with its own rules and hierarchies. Seeing an opening in Lila and Enzo’s misery to take back their position as the neighborhood’s rulers, the Solaras make a show out of being helpful. But their posturing is not convincing to Enzo, who accuses them of kidnapping his daughter after he refused to sell them shares of his company. Standing in Lila’s doorway, Marcello keeps repeating that he understands Enzo’s pain, which, along with their impossible promises that they’ll find Tina, maddens Enzo. He would’ve jumped at their necks if it weren’t for Lila holding him back.
Just when it seems like things couldn’t possibly get worse, Rino goes missing, too. The relationship between Lila and her brother had been fraying for years, but Rino was one of the most important people in Lila’s childhood — she saw in him the spark of repressed genius, someone whose circumstances, like her own, oppressed his potential to thrive. Gennaro and Stefano find Rino’s dead body in an abandoned train car, a tourniquet still tied on his bicep. The sight angers Stefano; he all but kicks the corpse, then forces his son to look at it: “This is how you’ll end up.” Gennaro, frightened, wonders why it’s only now that Stefano has decided to act like a father. The only people he respects in the neighborhood are Lila and Enzo.
If Lila has always maintained an implacable front, even as the boundaries of her world dissolved and she was scared, sick, or angry, now, as she spirals into grief, she begins to resemble Antonio’s mom, old Melina Cappuccio, the neighborhood’s erstwhile crazy lady. People were scared of Melina: they believed that just by looking at her, they could absorb some of her misfortune. But Melina always fascinated Lila — the authenticity of madness, untethered from the social mores that dominated their environment, made sense for Lila. As she lights candles on an altar built for her missing daughter, Lila finds a dead bird wrapped in a piece of fabric amongst the trinkets and rosaries adorning the ledge. A group of school-aged boys cackle when she finds it. “You deserve to be killed,” Lila yells, crazily. “They won’t even let you into hell!” Her voice breaks as she cries out, and walking away, she throws the dead bird forcefully on the ground. When Lenù first returned to Naples after leaving Florence, she noticed how people in the neighborhood had started treating her with devoted reverence; now, as she walks down the street, it’s as if a force field repels others from coming in too close. They avoid her like they once avoided Melina.
One of the things that brings Lila a small measure of comfort is her affection for Imma. Lila clings on to Lenù’s youngest daughter, and Lenù lets her, leaving Imma upstairs for as long as the next morning. The grief and confusion Imma herself must have felt through all of this go somewhat unexamined, but I can only imagine the shock of suddenly losing your inseparable best friend, who might as well be your sister. At first, Lila addresses her with patience, but when Imma presses on the question of when Tina will return, Lila orders her to mind her business and shut up. Imma is relieved to see her mother and anxious to go home. Witnessing Lila’s frustration, Lenù decides that she won’t have her look after the girls anymore.
Dede and Elsa, once besotted with their cool, beautiful aunt, have lost all respect for Lila. Dede, enraged by Lila’s methods of dealing with Gennaro, believes that Lila lost her child on purpose, an accusation she bases on the fact that Lila hasn’t shed a tear. Not content with that, she wants to call the police — that mythical authority — when she hears Lila yelling and breaking things in yet another fight with Gennaro. Lenù calls up to Lila to tone it down, but Lila retorts that if her daughters don’t want to hear their fighting, they should just cover their ears. Elsa continues to be unhelpful, relishing in the novel thrill of calling someone a fucking bitch when you’re twelve years old. Elsa’s mean streak, while amusing and borderline cool — there is something charming about a difficult girl’s reign of terror — is also concerning. Dede rats her out: she cuts class, forges signatures, is hated by her peers. The hurricane of chaos intensifies around Lenù; she stands still and helpless in the eye of it.
Now that Dede is 16, she can watch her sisters when Lenù goes out of town for work. One day, while they are all sitting in the courtyard, Lila, now graying, her hair stringy and unbrushed, comes ordering them back in — it’s dangerous outside. Later, Lenù explains to the girls that Lila had learned about the disaster in Chernobyl and become worried about the radiation. At the moment, though, the girls couldn’t care less. Dede uses the opportunity to tell Lila what she really thinks — she’s a shitty mother because she hasn’t cried since Tina disappeared — and Lila fully slaps her across the face. She doesn’t spare Elsa, either, who tries to stand up for her sister. Her authority prevails and she brings the girls home, where they remain for days until Lenù returns from her trip.
All huddled in their mother’s bed while she unpacks, the girls tell Lenù everything. In anticipation of what Enzo will later ask of her, Lenù instructs her daughters to be patient with her aunt’s unthinkable grief. Mother and daughters all sleep together — Tina’s disappearance is a strong bonding agent for Lenù’s family. Perhaps gaining some strength from this renewed affection, Lenù tries to shake Lila out of the more immediate trappings of her distress: she encourages her friend to focus on work, to find some way to get over her grief. But the all-encompassing emotion that Lila feels, she explains, is anger. And anger usually needs an outlet. Lila lays into Dede, Elsa, and Imma, saying how rude and entitled the girls are. With no possible way of actually knowing what’s going through her friend’s mind, Lenù imagines it all instead. She fantasizes about what Lila might want to say: “Tina was supposed to be better than all of you, but they took her away.” Even as she tries to put herself in Lila’s shoes and grasp what she could possibly be feeling — the novelist’s job — Lenù concludes that what is actually going through Lila’s mind is unfathomable and probably much worse than anything she could ever come up with.
When walking with the girls along the stradone, Lila, Lenù, and Enzo run into the Solaras with their families, and the brothers make a show out of admiring Lenù. They ask her to take the kids to the library and show them what to read — she’s an inspiration to them, unlike Lila, who didn’t study and never became anything. Elisa ignores her sister completely, and everyone ignores Lila. When Michele tries to take Lenù’s hand, she pulls it back, and her mother’s bracelet falls on the floor. Marcello picks it up and promises to get it fixed. When Lenù lets him take it, Lila scoffs: “You’re even worse at defending yourself now, you’ll never see that bracelet again.”
In moments like those, Lila’s old self shows through — but she is increasingly losing her bearings. As she spirals deeper into her inner torment, her exterior comes undone. One night during a windstorm, when Enzo is in Avellino, Lenù comes up to invite Lila to dinner. Lila’s makeup is smeared all over her face; the windows of the apartment are wide open, the wind rattling the empty rooms. Instead of eating dinner at Lenù’s house, Lila requests her dinner to be brought up as if she were in a hotel or a hospital; Lenù humors her friend, bringing the meal on a tray. Lila conspicuously plays the madwoman: her cryptic remarks are delivered with a mischievous glint in her eye as if she were saying, I’ll show you crazy. In the bathroom, she goes on and on about how her suspicion that Gennaro was Nino’s son effectively made him Nino’s actual son for a few years; that if you believe something strongly enough, it becomes a reality. She mocks Lenù’s limp, arguing that Lenù invented the hip pain so that she could keep her mother alive for a little longer. Looking into her ragged reflection in the mirror, Lila wonders out loud if Tina will look like her when she turns forty. At first, it seems like a nice sentiment, but on second thought, it sounds more like a curse: if she’s alive somewhere, when she’s forty, will Tina look this bedraggled, this insane?
The cogs in Lenù’s brain immediately start to turn. Being around Lila makes Lenù’s thinking more unique, more intelligent and fearless. “You help me make connections between distant things,” she says. Lila looks pleased; it makes her feel good to be useful. The purpose that she’s lost in motherhood, with one daughter missing and one nearly unrecognizable son, is rediscovered in the birth of ideas.
Lenù stays up writing all night. She muses that adulthood is about “recognizing that I needed Lila’s nudges;” with age and experience, she can find the middle ground between wanting to be Lila and wanting to be herself: she can take what she needs from Lila and then create her own meanings. While she works, her daughters catch a cold. When Lenù finds her daughters at the breakfast table, Dede’s fever is subsiding but Imma has a sore throat. In a hungover daze from spending the whole night thinking, Lenù brings up breakfast for Lila. But when she opens the door to the upstairs apartment, Lila looks even crazier than she did the night before. Her makeup is still all over her face; the remnants of dinner remain uncleared on the table. More concerningly, Lila is wailing in pain, cursing that her “gut has been spilling out” all night. Lenù finds bloodied paper towels littering the kitchen.
On the way to the pharmacy to get something that’ll help with Lila’s pain, Lenù runs into Carmen, who apologizes for the lawsuit and confesses that the Solaras had forced her to file it. As they hug it out, they hear gunshots, and Lenù runs to see what’s going on. Fallen on the bottom of the church steps, their shirts soaked with blood, are Michele and Marcello Solara. Carmen walks away, frightened, but Lenù gets even closer to the scene of the crime, asking witnesses what happened. Someone says they saw someone come out of a red Ford and shoot the two brothers point blank — Lenù imagines it was Pasquale and Nadia, still on the run, wearing balaclavas. When she runs home to tell Lila — whose pain seems to have gotten worse — what happened, Lila gets a demented look in her face. “Tina came out of my belly again and she’s taking revenge on everyone,” she seethes. “She killed them,” she smiles, looking disturbingly like the Joker.
In Più
• I am struck by all of the bathroom scenes in this show; it’s where many confidences are shared, where the light is always soft and gold, like in a dream. It seems as if whenever Lenù, Lila, or even their daughters are questioning their identities — why they bear the names they do, for example, or the force of a person’s desire — they are placed in front of the mirror, which serves as a window into their past as well as into their future. Looking at themselves, Lenù and Lila remember who they once were and are reminded of who they have become.