My Brilliant Friend Recap: Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too
One of the most striking aspects of Ferrante’s writing in the Neapolitan Quartet, I’ve always thought, is that Lenù’s perspective is so intense that it overwhelms the narrative — by the time you get to the end of each book, you feel like you’re part of Lenù’s brain. Maybe this is why when reading the novels it’s easier to understand, and even sympathize, with her obsession with Nino, while watching it play out on television is pure torture. After last week’s episode, I turned to a friend who is also a fan of the books but has yet to watch the new season and raged, “Fucking Nino.” “I love Nino,” she replied matter-of-factly and, I think, insanely.
It feels different to relive the fever dream of their affair on the visual medium partly because we are more aware of what exceeds the boundaries of Lenù’s perspective. Reading the books, we know that she has become almost irreparably lost within herself; one of the most recognizable signs of obsession is self-involvement, and Ferrante makes sure we know this. But seeing Dede and Elsa in the background of her phone calls or watching the way they watch their distracted mother carefully brings a whole new dimension to Lenù’s torment. It’s deeply frustrating, and it makes you wish you could just jump into the television and shake her by the shoulders and tell her to get real. This is what a friend would do; it is what Lila is trying to do, by the way, when she’s not getting shoved off the phone by Lenù.
Granted, Lenù is not the only selfish person populating this world. “The Dispersion” opens on Nino showing her a massive apartment with a phenomenal view of the ocean which he has just picked out for them, and for which he plans on paying with the riches of his important new job, the one Lila told Lenù about at the café. Lenù demands to see Eleonora: she doesn’t believe what Nino has told her about the way his marriage ended, and she won’t trust him anymore. When he tries to dismiss her worries, Lenù gets physical: She shoves him and calls him a liar and a piece of shit (finally). Like any manipulative little weasel would do, he gets all sensitive about Lenù’s outburst and proposes to “explain everything:” When he tried to end his marriage to Eleonora before he went to Montpellier with Lenù, she threatened to kill herself in a number of different ways, so he finally told her it was over between him and Lenù, fearful that she’d follow through with the threat. When later she realized Nino had lied about his affair, Eleonora simply resolved to pretend nothing had happened. “This fiction,” as he calls it, protected Nino from having to actually commit either way: He lived peacefully within it with his belly full, knowing he could have his cake and eat it, too. He cries all while telling Lenù this. By the grace of God, it doesn’t work on her. She leaves him on the floor of the apartment sitting against the floral wallpaper and declares, “It’s over between us.”
Nino won’t take no for an answer. Over the course of the next several weeks, he calls Lenù over and over again, begging her to come back, saying he can’t live without her and all the other things we’ve become accustomed to hearing him say. Lila also calls Lenù at Adele’s to see how her friend is faring, but Lenù is short on patience. She yells and curses on the phone with Nino, startling even Tania, Adele’s housekeeper. When Adele comes into the room to reproach Lenù for her Neapolitan swearing –– all pretense of being enlightened to the plight of the working class having flown out the window, Adele is all classism, a revelation further emphasized by the tone with which she addresses Tania –– Lenù gives it to her straight. At least she owned up to her mistake in front of everyone, even her daughters, when Adele never had the courage to take responsibility for her own affairs. Taken aback by this accusation, Adele says that not only is Lenù a bad person, but she will never know what true sacrifice is; it’s a shame the girls will have to grow up with someone so selfish. But Lenù has lost the ability to give one single shit what Adele thinks of her, which is honestly for the best. She will pack her and her daughters’ things herself, without Tania’s help, who looks relieved to be left out of this mess.
With her newfound freedom from Adele’s judgment, Lenù has also freed herself, it seems, from any ability to make a rational decision. At the train station with Dede and Elsa, she changes course at the last minute. She’d been planning to show up with her daughters at Nino and Eleonora’s doorstep in Naples — she wanted him to take responsibility for his share in this “turmoil” to pay for his part. But she ends up boarding the train to Milan instead. Sometimes, it’s a good thing to have a little shame, to be a little embarrassed of the lengths to which you’d go for a man, like schlep your children all the way to his house without considering how this might damage them. Lenù is frustrated with Nino and with herself, and she takes it out on Dede and Elsa emotionally and verbally in the way that she separates their fighting a little too aggressively. But she catches herself; she knows that she is behaving badly, that she loves Nino too much to even be in the same city as him without losing her mind.
She takes the girls to Mariarosa’s, who, as usual, is housing another one million people, including Franco still. Mariarosa is generous toward Lenù and her nieces without being a pushover: She won’t accept the way Lenù speaks about her mother, and she tries to remind her of how much Adele helped her before they became sworn enemies. No doubt exhausted mentally and physically from the journey, the sight of all their luggage makes Lenù cry. Stupidly, she calls Nino, just to be disappointed by him again. He acts as if he doesn’t know why she is distancing herself from him. When she brings up the fact he never left his wife while she blew up her whole life for him, he says, “Stop fixating on that,” as if she’s being silly to mention it. The phone nearly explodes from ringing so much in the days that ensue.
Mariarosa, Franco, and the girls watch Lenù carefully every time she picks up the receiver. Caught up in her problems, she might have forgotten that her daughters are living, thinking beings rather than just avatars in the tangled knot that has become her life, but Dede is observing everything quietly. One night, she sits with her sister as Lenù talks to a group of feminists gathered at Mariarosa’s about motherhood and the mother’s body, which is rarely understood as a body at all. The doorbell interrupts her talk, and Dede goes to answer it. Two police officers came to check in on the noise, which the neighbors complained about. With a smirk and a hostile, sarcastic confidence, Mariarosa ridicules the cops: She asks them to sit in the meeting. Will they talk a little about their mothers’ bodies? Before they leave, Dede mischievously tells one of the officers her aunt’s full name and what she does for work.
She has reason to be pissed at all of these adults who seem willing to play with her life, and I don’t think Dede acts innocently. She shows she has a grasp of what injustice is when she is quizzed by Franco on the relationship between the work of the common people and the full stomachs of the patricians. When Lenù, tired from work, gets home, Dede accuses her: “I eat but it’s you who gets fat.” Still oblivious to the fact that the girls are catching onto more than they think, Franco and Lenù look amused; Franco even laments that they’re not his own daughters with Lenù. Just as they start to wonder about what could’ve been but wasn’t, Pietro arrives home with Mariarosa in a surprise visit to his daughters.
There, Pietro learns that his daughters are not going to school; they are just studying at home, where the police came the night before. Not unreasonably, he freaks out. He accuses Lenù and Mariarosa of being irresponsible for taking the girls out of an environment where they had a routine, discipline, and method and plunging them into a house with no rules or responsibilities, where they can stay up talking all night and not have to go to school the next day. Lenù and Mariarosa both argue that this practical education will be valuable for the girls; besides, everyone swears this arrangement is temporary, though no one has any idea when it will end. Franco butts in to suggest that one day, Dede and Elsa will look back on this period of their lives as a happy time when they got to be in the room with the adults. It’s only once a man has spoken that Pietro starts to calm down, which has been true at least since Nino told him to wash a cup once in a while, but he holds his ground. When Franco says that soon Lenù will take them back to a more regimented life, Pietro asks: “Will they be able to go back to a regular life? If adults struggle to do it, imagine them.”
Of course, Pietro is absolutely right. Lenù knows it, too, and she enrolls the girls in school, where Elsa already looks like she will have trouble adjusting. Lenù is once more filled with shame by the centrality of Nino to her life, the way she puts him above everything else, including her daughters and her own self. As if sensing her agony from afar, Nino materializes in front of her apartment after three months without contact. He feeds her all of his old lines –– “I can’t leave Eleonora, but I can’t live without you,” etc. — before finally admitting the real reason why he won’t leave his wife: She is seven months pregnant, which puts the time of conception somewhere around when he and Lenù were in their honeymoon period. Lenù looks like she will actually faint or die or perhaps disintegrate into a pile of dust. She fully freaks out, screaming and sobbing and heaving, and begs Franco to throw Nino out of the apartment. Franco holds her and helps her regain her breath, but then argues in Nino’s defense that he’s come all the way here just to tell her the truth, which should count for something. “What if this is the only way he can love you?” He poses. In response, Lenù tells Franco to go fuck himself. She similarly slams Nino’s car door on his face, as she should!
With time, a routine slowly establishes itself in the three-person unit formed by Lenù, Dede, and Elsa. There are a few hiccups at first: when they’re finished eating dinner, Lenù tells her daughters to put on their pajamas without realizing they already have, which the girls find hilarious. It’s a relief to see Lenù laughing with her daughters instead of scolding them or hiding her sadness from them; for once, they seem like a family. As they finish up their dinner, Franco comes into the room, looking and sounding melancholy. Him and Lenù talk briefly about her work —she is under contract for another book but is having trouble writing — before Franco advises that, if she really loves Nino more than she loves herself, she has to accept him as he is, wife, children and all. “In love,” he says, “it’s only over once you can become yourself again, without fear or disgust,” a balance Lenù hasn’t been able to strike since Nino showed up at her and Pietro’s house in Florence. But the way Franco speaks, and what he says, is bigger than Lenù or her problems: you can tell that he is talking about himself.
Normality is just about established in the house — the girls fight coming home from school as any pair of siblings would, they like to watch cartoons on the TV, they are picked up from school by their mom and they eat lunch together — when Elsa brings Lenù a note that’d been taped to Franco’s room door, asking Lenù not to let the girls in. When she goes to check on him, she discovers his body in a pool of blood, both of his wrists slit. In this context, his note is almost unbearable, akin to Sylvia Plath’s famous plate of cookies left out for her children in her final hours. Franco was larger than himself; in his darkest hour, he still considered the girls. He was good for Lenù because he was an example of someone who could live for others as well as himself, something she or Nino have never been able to do.
Lenù has a dream that at Franco’s funeral, no one would speak or see her, except for Mirko, Silvia’s son with Nino; and in the coffin lay Nino’s own body, also unreachable. When she wakes up, she checks his breathing to make sure it is really just a dream. In the aftermath of Franco’s death, Mariarosa became hostile towards her and the girls, so Lenù packed her bags and came back to Naples, where she could share in Nino’s fiction and play house in the beautiful, light-flooded apartment together. Lenù watches the sunrise from one of the windows, considering for the third time in this episode that, despite her convictions and her talk, despite the fact that she makes a living thinking and writing about women’s autonomy and independence, she has sacrificed her life — and her daughters’ lives — time and again to a man who cannot even give her the respect of committing fully to her. The answer to this never-ending conundrum, maybe, will be where it all started. Dede and Elsa in tow, Lenù decides it’s time to face the neighborhood.
In Più
• I know I said it last week, but I think it bears repeating that Alba Rohrwacher is bringing a subtlety to this role that is catapulting it into the next level. Not that Margherita Mazzucco didn’t do a wonderful job, but Rohrwacher brings a confidence that makes the older Lenù seem all the more alive.
• I wasn’t sure how I felt about the dissolves transitioning between Nino’s repeated calls to Lenù in the middle part of this episode. So far, the direction of the show has found inventive ways to signal the passage of time — real news footage last week, for example, or even just a cleaner cut from the nightmare to the apartment this same episode — and the dissolves felt kind of like an after-thought. Why not a series of jump cuts of the phone slamming, for example? I do think some of the framing this week was inspired; I was particularly fond of the way a wall separated Nino from Lenù and Franco as he tried to calm her down.
• Dede looked absolutely adorable as Pippi Longstocking during what I’m assuming was Carnevale, a crossover that filled the heart of my 7-year-old self …!