My Brilliant Friend season 4 - Closing the chapter
Director Laura Bispuri discusses the fourth and final season of My Brilliant Friend, the TV adaptation of a beloved book series, one final chapter after thirteen years of ‘Ferrante fever’…
My Brilliant Friend’s third season ended on a dramatic note: the show’s protagonist, Lenù, played by a fresh-faced Margherita Mazzucco (who was only 20 at the time of filming), boards a plane for the first time in her life. The once-dutiful wife and mother has impulsively fled to France, leaving her family behind, to be with her now-married childhood crush, the wretched Nino Sarratore, a man who once had an affair with her oldest and dearest friend, Lila. As the plane takes off, Lenù squeezes Nino’s hand and peers excitedly out the window through her wide-brimmed glasses brushed under a classic 70s blowout, resembling Farrah Fawcett if Charlie’s Angels was a domestic portrait of the disintegration of a marriage.
Chronologically, season four picks up right where its predecessor left off, but with a notable shift in mood. The first episode opens on a hotel lobby – a tracking shot following a golden-haired woman, her face obscured, as she approaches the service desk. “I’d like to call Italy”, she says in French. Suddenly, the camera veers up-close to reveal the face of Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, a woman in her forties whose heavy disposition carries the weight of a young girl’s mistakes.
Rohrwacher’s version of Lenù, led under the direction of Italian filmmaker Laura Bispuri, takes the final chapter of this story away from the starry-eyed 70s and plunges into the dour and gritty depths of the 80s. After two seasons spent surrounded by Renaissance architecture and sparkling Italian beaches, viewers of My Brilliant Friend can expect to come back full circle to where it all began: a poverty-ridden neighbourhood in Naples, where past tragedies resurrect themselves and trickle their way up and down the cold grey pavement of the stradone.
Bispuri explains that the show required a change in tone to accompany its new cast, who play older versions of the characters as they enter a new and even more emotionally tumultuous phase of life. “My style is very close to the actresses and the actors,” Bispuri explains. “I usually shoot with very long takes and every take is different from the other, in order to create something special and new every time”.
My Brilliant Friend is HBO and Rai’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, which comprises of four sprawling novels which tell the story of two friends, Raffaella ‘Lila’ Cerullo and Elena ‘Lenù’ Greco, whose lives periodically converge and break apart both spectacularly and brutally over sixty years. Ferrante uses their inner lives as a lens with which to view the outer world and its hefty subjects: class, patriarchy, organised crime and the fervent political history of Italy over half a century, in all its turmoil, as it relates to these two Neapolitan women.
The novels have sold 15 million copies worldwide, and have been translated into 45 different languages, with the first in the quartet recently ranked number one in The New York Times’s best 100 books of the 21st century. Since 2011, these books have garnered a wide and dedicated following which soon came to be known as ‘Ferrante fever’.
“I think one of the most striking aspects of the Neapolitan Quartet is its capaciousness,” Raffaela Bassili, who recaps the series for Vulture, tells me. “By spanning a whole lifetime, it's also a portrait of a moment in history, not only on the level of the characters but macroscopically, in terms of the world at large. This expansiveness is what gives the tetralogy the sense that it's larger than life”.
I first came to the Neapolitan quartet after reuniting with an estranged female friend, with whom I had fallen out partly due to a rift caused by a man we had both dated at different times. Ferrante fans may recognise this man as a stand-in for the aforementioned Nino Sarratore, a character who serves as the object of affection and destruction for both women over the course of their lives. Bispuri offers Nino perhaps a shred more grace than I do. “Nino is a terrible man, but he is under his father’s destiny”, she rationalises. “[I]n some way he believes in his way of loving”. But then she adds: “that is pathetic”.
Though Bispuri was a fan of the novels, she had not been involved in the TV adaptation until the showrunner, Saverio Costanzo, approached her to direct all ten episodes of the show’s fourth and final season. “When I heard that a series would be made from the books, I thought that I really would have liked to do it”, she remembers. “So when Saverio Costanzo called me and asked me if I wanted to shoot the whole last season, I thought that it would be a great challenge for me and also a sort of dream from the past”.
“It was very important for me to face this whole project with a lot of love and responsibility”, Bispuri says. “Many people loved this story, this friendship, these women, and I had to bring everybody to the end”.
Though the television series hasn’t experienced the same earth-shattering popularity as the novels, it has succeeded in adding new dimensions to this perennial story. Each of the four seasons corresponds with its respective novel, beginning in the 1950s and concluding after the turn of the millennium. Costanzo, who was chosen by Elena Ferrante herself, has undertaken the difficult task of recreating the passing of time with compelling precision. Each decade represented throughout the series is portrayed through a style of filmmaking specific to that time.
“The first season was close to Neorealism, the second to Nouvelle Vague, the third to New Hollywood”, Bispuri explains when I ask her about this. “But [Costanzo] didn’t tell me anything about the style that he imagined for this last season”. Later, at their first screening in New York, she overheard Costanzo tell a journalist that the 80s (which is when most of the final season takes place) was an undefined era for cinema, underpinned by great creative freedom. “I didn’t know this while shooting, but with a sort of magic I worked in a very instinctive way and with this idea of freedom in my mind”.
Before the show first aired in 2018, many readers were nervous about being confronted with real faces to match the characters who had lived only in their mind’s eye for so long. Elena Ferrante was also apprehensive. “Usually, the images I have in mind as I write are iridescent, sometimes hyper-defined, sometimes blurred, so I would have run after the most various incarnations,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018.
This is why Costanzo took the casting process very seriously. In fact, the producers auditioned 9000 Neapolitan children for the first season before reaching a decision. The series began with child actresses Ludovica Nasti and Elisa Del Genio playing Lila and Lenù in their elementary school years for the first two episodes before they passed the baton onto Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco, who continued to play these leading roles from their characters’ adolescence right up until they reach their mid-thirties at the end of the third season.
Girace, now 21, describes the experience of playing a role over such a vast chunk of that character’s life. “I took Lila from the age of 13 to 35, so obviously [there were] many things I had not yet experienced on a personal level and I had to discover them [as if I was living them] in advance”, she remarks. “It made me discover so much about myself: the energy, the strength, the femininity; it took away that sense of inadequacy and discomfort I carried as a young girl and made me flourish. When I played Lila, I felt more alive than ever, and this has remained in my life”.
Now, season four is ushering in a new cast to take on the twenty-year period which spans the final novel, The Story of the Lost Child. Alba Rohrwacher, who has been voicing Lenù as the narrator since season 1 is now embracing the role on-screen as well as off, while Neapolitan actress Irene Maiorino has been cast as the wild and dazzling Lila. Maiorino spoke with The Cut in September about the process of transitioning this character into her final iteration. “Transformation, for me, was very soft, and I put a lot of attention on the end of the story”, she said. “By the finale you can see my entire new version of Lila”.
Bispuri attests to this, telling me that the final two episodes bring about a violent shift in tone. “There is a big crack that changes the atmosphere and the story”. Those who have read The Story of the Lost Child will know why. “It was a millimetric work to bring her close to this pain and to her choice to disappear forever”.
At the time of writing this, I have yet to see those final two episodes. Although I know exactly what happens, I have no idea what to expect. I’m afraid to relive the cruel destiny that awaits these characters, but I’m more afraid that once I do, I never will again. “I was very scared about the last meeting between Elena and Lila”, Bispuri says, echoing my dread. “I knew that they [wouldn’t] meet again in the future”.
In all three iterations, the leading cast members have succeeded in displaying their characters’ vulnerabilities in sharp focus and then flicking the switch to obfuscating their true intentions almost entirely. The enigmatic knowability that each character possesses is exactly the reason for the Neapolitan quartet’s wide-reach and enduring popularity. Readers of the novels and viewers of the show alike have taken solace in an emotional resonance with characters whose lives may on their face differ radically from their own. I myself continually fluctuate between identifying more with Lila or with Lenù, or sometimes with another of the wide cast of characters whose stories are interwoven with theirs over the tetralogy.
Bispuri reflects on the relationships she built with all the characters as a continual process of discovery. “My trip inside Ferrante’s writing was very special because I went in depth into her labyrinthic material, step by step. As I said, I read the books years ago, but reading them again before and during the shooting I kept finding new things. I went in a sort of vertical trip, and I discovered always more and more”.
Bispuri had no direct correspondence with Ferrante, but Costanzo exchanged emails with the author during the development of the series and described this experience to The Sydney Morning Herald in 2018 as “like working with a ghost”.
When the novels were first published, Ferrante’s true identity was a complete mystery, writing under a pseudonym in a steadfast decision to remain anonymous, which has been honoured by her publishers. Decades on, theories and investigations have posed possible answers but the majority of readers have actively shunned efforts to unmask the author, citing her right to privacy.
While there may be an ethical component to this reaction, my intuition tells me that we’d rather not know because to attribute the creation of the Neapolitan quartet to an actual human being could compromise the deeply personal relationship many of us have formed with the text. We may begin to ask ourselves: if this work was made by someone else, does it still belong to us?
“I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors,” Ferrante once wrote in a letter to her publishers. “I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own.”
If that is the case, then My Brilliant Friend’s epic final season carries Ferrante’s torch majestically. “I really hope that everybody can find the proximity with the characters that every reader felt in Ferrante's book”, says Bispuri. “The mystery, the dream, the truth. I put all of my self inside this work and I'm grateful to have lived this incredible adventure”.