You walk to work every day. You see the same things, the same people; you utter the same greetings, catch the same scents on the air. It’s right there in front of you, all the time, but you don’t really see it anymore, and even when it catches your eye, you don’t see it as you once did: The sea. It’s there, a vast, sparkling thing, but it’s also just a fact of life. And so when your daughter crosses a busy street without so much as a glance to either side, when she stands, transfixed, it takes you a minute to understand. It’s the sea! It’s the sea, seen through the eyes of someone who has never seen it before. And somehow, suddenly, you can see it that way, too.
Many such shifts in perspective occur throughout the course of “Le Smarginatura (Dissolving Margins),” an hour that splits its focus between near-universal experiences and those specific to this one neighborhood at this one period in time. It’s not a trick unique to My Brilliant Friend, nor one employed in this episode alone—the first episode used such a shift to illustrate the importance of Lila’s entrance into Lenú’s life. But here, they’re a big part of the focus, even encompassing the episode’s title, which refers to a moment in which she sees her brother Rino (Gennaro De Stefano) in a new light (figuratively as well as literally, thanks to Saverio Costanzo’s haunting direction of that scene).
What’s interesting about the approach of Costanzo and his fellow writers here is that My Brilliant Friend seems as interested in why characters were locked into their previous perspectives as it is in why they suddenly saw things in a new light. Lenú, shrinking from attention and praise, even from a friend, cannot see that people are interested in her in much the same way they’re interested in Lila; no amount of strangers constantly remarking about how pretty she is can change that. Lila, eager to work and work endlessly in pursuit of the perfect iteration of her new shoe design, can’t see that what drives Rino is something much messier and less patient; accustomed to seeing him as her partner and defender, it takes an actual fog, some unsettling lighting, and a rooftop full of screaming men to make this clear. Once seen, it can’t be unseen. The status-quo, particularly in relationships, can be a potent force, but a new perspective emits a pull no less, and sometimes far more, powerful.
That’s certainly the case with Lila and Lenú. Jealousy and a sense of competition have driven them together as often as it’s pushed them apart. Lenú’s increased awareness of Lila’s affect on the young men in their neighborhood, as well as her frustration at being outpaced by a friend whose only ongoing education is the local library, leads Lenú to move further away from a friend to whom she is inextricably drawn. Lila succeeds in Greek, so Lenú retreats to her studies again, racing to catch up; Lila seems to attract every boy in the friends’ shared orbit, so Lenú accepts the first suitor who approaches her, despite the fact that she’s uninterested in him (and despite his being a total fucking creep one episode ago).
But while My Brilliant Friend centers, as always, on the my and the friend of the title, this episode offers much more space to the political and societal forces at work in the neighborhood than previous installments. In both the dance and New Years scenes, you can watch awareness and tension zing across the room (or roof) by simply following the glances of those in attendance. One son watches another warily, and one friend stands ready to pull another back. Long histories and inherited grievances percolate throughout the dance sequence, leading to a sense of uneasiness that doesn’t evaporate until the episode’s last act—and once it’s gone, only a few minutes pass before it flares up again, albeit from a new source.
If the dance sequence is tense—and despite Gaia Girace’s joyful dancing, it’s absolutely tense—then the moment in which the jubilant peace of that New Years Eve crumbles is something else entirely. Pasquale (Eduardo Scarpetta), after offering a new perspective to Lila, gets one of his own from the friends; it’s one they stumbled on as they attempted to understand the intentions of Stefano (Giovanni Amura). The children of a murdered man and the children of the man jailed for that murder forge a new peace, and the Solaras fire explosives into that peace.
But the fireworks aren’t the source of the the scene’s stomach-churning anxiety. The credit there goes to Gennaro De Stefano’s performance as Rino, who shows as a young man whose simmering anger, resentment, fear, and feelings of hopelessness erupt on a rooftop like a volcano of spitting, careening self-destruction. Previous chapters of My Brilliant Friend have ended on a turning point in Lila and Lenú’s relationship, but here we simply watch Lila watch her brother until his death seems all but certain; then she drags him below and we’re left alone, unable to see through the fog.
Osservazioni vaganti
- Nice moment in which Lila and Lenú once again stand side by side at the Carracci’s door—they just look at each other, remember, and move on.
- You’re telling me Lila read enough to get first through fourth place in the library’s most-read competition and never learned about the black market?
9 Comments
I’ve been really interested in seeing how the show would handle the dissolving margins scene and I wasn’t disappointed. From what I remember of the book and from the show’s previous use of dream sequences I’d half expected it to be more obviously nightmarish, but the way they ended up doing it managed to capture the feeling of creeping horror while still staying grounded in reality.
Agreed. And speaking of the book, I am glad I read it a long time ago, and have pretty much forgotten the plot. The show seems to follow the book fairly closely (as far as I can remember) and the events that guide the story are familiar but add details that I either overlooked or were not in the book at all. I’ll be the first to comment that I am enjoying the mini series more than the books. I mean, I liked reading them but I remember thinking that the plot seemed a little soap opera-ey. The series, however, is put together in a way that makes the characters and the events much more believable.
What I found most difficult about the books was the intense internality of them. Everything was in Lenu’s mind. The show, through the direction and the brilliant acting, gives us peeks into the minds of others. It’s refreshing. Lenu was a whiny, mopey brat a lot, and it got tiresome. Like I’m sure we were intended to, I wanted more and more and more Lina. The show is filling that desire.
I especially loved how the exposition from Pasquale was handled. It was as much a character beat about Lila’s thirst for knowledge of the world around her, as it was laying out the map of the neighborhood. (And, yes, I can believe that Lila’s library didn’t have much available reading on the camorra or black market, and if they did, it looks like her tastes skewed to the classics, like the Aeneid, etc.)And oh, I loved, loved loved the dancing scene. I said at one point, “She’s gonna kill Marcello when she realizes,” and my husband didn’t understand at all how she couldn’t know who she was dancing with. Dancing can be a trance-state if you’re really feeling it and I just loved the actress for each of those minutes. I could have watched her dance for half the episode… She looked transcendent.
She almost seemed drunk. They did show her drinking before she started dancing with Pasquale, but I think you are right; Lila was near euphoric from dancing. It was so much fun to see Lila enjoy herself. Did anyone else get Back to the Future vibes when Stefano stepped in? Not Biff, but rather Courtney Gains’ character. Interestingly, My Brilliant Friend would have taken place much later than the 1955 Back to the Future universe.
Of course Lila knew nothing about the Black Market. History is made by those who win, both legally and illegally. It’s the same way in which textbooks by major publishers in Texas didn’t even cite slavery as a contributing factor of the Civil War until recently. One of the great shames of the Italian government is that it abandoned Southern Italy to the Mafia, Camorra, Ndrangheta and other local mobs far beyond the end of the occupation by the Nazi/Coalition during WWII. You wouldn’t find it in history books. You wouldn’t find it told in books until the 70s and 80s. Those who have written it, did so at their own peril. Ferrante herself can probably talk about it more freely because she’s using a pseudonym. She isn’t keeping her identity hidden just for giggles, after all. Hidipovertyng her identity IS what allows her to talk about the role of the Camorra in keeping Naples mired in poverty up to the present day.
The show is doing a really good job at capturing the idea that friendship isn’t just full-time sunshine and rainbows. Resentment, competition, jealousy. These are all things that happen even between the best of friends.
I agree , there is no way that Lila wouldn’t have known about the black market, unless the author was trying to say that women weren’t allowed to even think politics. In the post war era in South Italy politics was in the air you breathed, it was a constant topic of discussion. Socialists, Communists, Monarchists , Christian Democrats were everywhere. Everyone knew about the Cammora , Fascists were more hidden as after the war everyone seemed to have been a partisan [not true of course] overt Fascists didn’t come out again till I believe around the 70’s or 80’s. Naples was also very very proud of it’s uprising , called the 4 days of Naples. When the Germans in reaction to the surrender of Italy to the Allies and approach of the Americans and British from the invasion at Salerno, began to round up all the Neapolitan young men to bring them to Germany for forced labor. A motley group of teenagers[ the infamous street urchins of Naples], Italian Army deserters [the Army had almost completely broken up], sailors, nascent partisans, and Communists staged an uprising and rescued many of the young men and prevented the Germans from destroying parts of Naples, Naples claimed ,with some hyperbole, to be the only city in Europe who had liberated itself from the Nazi’s , this was imbued in every Neapolitan kid after the war, especially in the poorer neighborhoods. I can’t believe that the girls didn’t know this. That being said the production is wonderful, and except in some scenes they are speaking only in dialect which is almost a foreign language from Italian.
The firework scene was brilliant. The lighting, acting, music all came together to form one of the most well done television scenes I’ve seen.