My Brilliant Friend’s final scene is an exercise in unbearable pathos

In My Brilliant Friend, there’s no such thing as leaving. The third season of this graceful, sumptuously shot HBO drama, subtitled “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” after the wildly popular Elena Ferrante novel, takes place mostly in 1970s Florence. It’s where Lenù lives with her husband, Pietro, and two daughters, having finally broken free from the cloistered Naples neighbourhood where she grew up. In her mind, she hasn’t just escaped the prying eyes of her family; she’s rejected their old-fashioned Catholic mores. How else can a season that starts with the promise of a wedding end with the diffused misery of a double affair?

In last week’s finale, Lenù (Margherita Mazzucco) leaves Pietro for Nino (Francesco Serpico), her floppy-haired childhood friend from Naples. She does it definitively, theatrically, even symbolically. The lovers board a plane to France with small, thrilled smiles – excited, if not by the ending of their respective marriages, then at least by how powerful it feels to find themselves on the other side of a colossal decision. A sense of momentum carries them to their seats. Now it’s the plane’s job to finish what they have begun – to put physical space between the couple and their old, pale lives.

But it’s the next part of life that’s difficult, isn’t it? The quiet moments after take-off. The camera holds on Lenù and Nino as the plane climbs above the clouds, an easy metaphor for the freedom the series offers up only to complicate. As they lean into the headrests, Lenù’s smile slides off. Nino’s head lolls in the opposite direction, his features collapsing into uncertainty and perhaps the early flicker of boredom. (Before his marriage, we knew him to be something of a cad.)

It brings to mind Mike Nichols’s iconic final shot in 1967’s The Graduate: Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross – still in her wedding veil – riding the bus into the future, their goofy excitement fading to doubt as Simon and Garfunkel address the darkness. With even less – only the subtle twitching of our lovers’ faces and some darkly swelling piano – My Brilliant Friend bulldozes the possibility of a happy second act before the plane hits cruising altitude.

There is a pathos, and an unexpected sense of regression, in watching Lenù discard her life in cosmopolitan Florence for a man who knows her from home. Dialect is one of the series’ most potent symbols, and Lenù has relied on Italian to distance herself from her Neapolitan origins. She’s made a career of writing in a language that her parents cannot read; she’s raising her children in it. Yet even as Lenù speaks to him in Italian, Nino frequently answers in Neapolitan, a language in which her husband can’t touch her. The more she “leaves”, in this case, the closer she “stays”.

Which makes a plane – a setting that conjures claustrophobia along with escape – a perfectly torturous place to leave the couple until the next season, the show’s last. In a previous episode, when Nino begins visiting Florence for work, he finds Lenù living the same cliché of womanhood as each of their mothers: she cooks the meals, sets the table, watches the children. In Nino’s offer to wash the dishes, Lenù sees not just another man, but a reordering of life to which Pietro won’t consent. Love can be as boring as dividing the household chores.

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Ultimately, though, My Brilliant Friend is cynical about Lenù’s prospects for reinventing womanhood. Almost immediately, she’s begging Nino to pledge his love and to leave his wife. They rendezvous in parked cars and talk dirty in whispered phone calls. In short, she becomes a contrasting cliché: the other woman. There is no “leaving”; only different roles to play.

The episode ends with an awkward coda that takes place in the plane’s lavatory. Mazzucco, the 19-year-old actor who has somehow played Lenù marvellously from her teens into her thirties, looks in the mirror and sees the reflection of Alba Rohrwacher, the actor who will take over for My Brilliant Friend’s last season. I wish she’d seen herself. Because no matter her distance from Naples, Lenù always perceives the same girl with the same limited options. Her desires haven’t evolved beyond what that girl could have imagined wanting, which includes her childhood crush, Nino.

For Lenù, escape is so far an MC Escher woodcut – a series of never-ending flights of stairs, unexpected affairs and even international plane rides that lead circuitously back to the place she never really left.

‘My Brilliant Friend’ airs in the UK on Sky Atlantic and is available to watch on NOW. Watch on HBO in the US