“I was born in a poor, run-down neighborhood, very run-down, where men’s fury, their violence, was and is a daily occurrence.”
In an author’s talk, Elena Greco (Alba Rohrwacher), known to us as Lenù, is describing herself the way we encountered her in the first season of “My Brilliant Friend.” In a gang-ridden, suffocating area of 1950s Naples, she found an ally and sometime rival in Raffaella Cerullo, called Lila, with whom she would be bound for life.
By the fourth and final season, which begins Monday on HBO, Lenù has become the writer of her own story, in acclaimed essays and novels. But she is also still very much living it — drawn back to her old neighborhood, its passions and its dangers, as one of TV’s best series reaches a potent, finely observed conclusion.
Lenù and Lila met in the beginning of the series as classmates, two smart girls in a place of poverty and street beat-downs without much opportunity for women. (The younger Lenù was played by Elisa Del Genio and Margherita Mazzucco, Lila by Ludovica Nasti and Gaia Girace; in Season 4, Rohrwacher takes over as Lenù and Irene Maiorino as Lila.)
Lenù’s intellect is controlled and her nature studious; she’s a hard worker who does well in academic settings. Lenù’s genius is wild and uncontrolled — it burns and bursts out of her. Lenù is cautious and a people pleaser; Lila is enigmatic and brave, with a fierce sense of justice. Each has something missing in the other. Lenù adopts something of Lila’s rebelliousness. Lila, though she sometimes denigrates Lenù’s ivory-tower pursuits, also seems to admire and perhaps envy her success.
The differences in their intelligence and personalities foreshadow their future paths. Lenù goes into academia and eventually leaves home to become a writer. Lila drops out of school, marries the son of a loan shark and goes into business for herself, eventually becoming a local boss as feared as the neighborhood gangsters.
Both, in a way, are seeking a power that they and their families lack. For Lenù, that comes through escaping and winning acclaim in the wider world; for Lila, it is getting the money and clout to face the crooks and fascist thugs who still hold sway in town decades later.
Through Seasons 2 and 3, the series moves them through adulthood — marriages, breakups, children, affairs, disappointments and rivalries — deftly weaving class politics and the political turmoil of 1960s and 1970s Italy as the two women’s lives separate and intersect like sine waves on a graph.
“My Brilliant Friend” is based on the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, who is credited as a writer on the series, and it holds close to them in plot and narration. But unlike many TV adaptations, it is more than an illustrated audiobook. It finds its own visual language to recreate the moods that Ferrante cast on the page.
Laura Bispuri, who directs every episode of the new season, conveys a brutal intimacy by holding on tight head shots of the actors. In this story of people who cannot escape their closeness, the viewer cannot either; the camera pushes you into the hot faces of anger, lust, grief. The series retains Ferrante’s prose in Lenù’s voice-over, but it also gives you sweat and tears and grimy streets whose air clings to your skin.
The final season brings the series full circle. The first scene of the first season flashed forward to Lenù as an old woman (Elisabetta De Palo) getting a call from Lila’s son, alarmed that his mother has suddenly, apparently intentionally, gone missing. Season 4 lays out the reasons that Lila — long troubled by visions of “dissolving boundaries” between objects in the world — may have finally unraveled.
Lenù, now a well-known writer, has left her husband, Pietro (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio), for Nino (Fabrizio Gifuni), an intellectual and a longtime crush of both hers and Lila’s, who has his own fidelity issues. (Lenù recognizes the irony of being a feminist author who finds herself reliant on lousy men.) The relationship brings her and her young daughters back to Naples, where Lila, now a powerful businesswoman, is at war with the same bullies who ran the neighborhood in their childhood.
Even for successful women approaching middle age, the past is inescapable. (The season benefits from casting Rohrwacher and Maiorino; by Season 3, the generally excellent Mazzucco and Girace were harder to buy in the older roles.)
The old resentments and threats are still present, along with a more intangible sense of dread. “My Brilliant Friend” has a running motif of subterranean horror. In the first episode, the two girls bond by throwing their dolls into a dark, scary basement. Later, Lenù dreams of tiny creatures swarming from under the streets at night, infecting the adults with the rage they manifest in the daytime.
In a striking Season 4 episode, Lenù and Lila are caught in the midst of the 1980 earthquake that struck Naples. As buildings shake and people flee, Lenù sees a version of her nightmare image come to life: rats teeming out of sewer grates into the street. You can build as stable a life for yourself as you can. But you can never shake the fear, or the possibility, that the ground might split open and horrors escape from hell.
The season is subtitled, after Ferrante’s final book in the series, “The Story of the Lost Child.” The title has a literal meaning but also many figurative ones. There are children lost to drugs, to despair, to family dysfunction. There are also the children that Lenù and Lila and their friends were, now lost to time.
The final run of the series is both sensitive and devastating, moving without being sentimentalized. People often summarize stories about women with the catchall label, “It’s about female friendship.” But what these two have is something more complex and elusive — it is also a competition, a dependency, a fascination, a symbiosis. This is, simply put, one of the most incisive portraits of a lifelong relationship ever made for TV.
“My Brilliant Friend” is quietly ending just as HBO is celebrating the 25th anniversary of “The Sopranos,” which it marked with Alex Gibney’s engaging documentary, “Wise Guy: David Chase and ‘The Sopranos.’” Over the years, other HBO dramas have tried to recreate its crime-story magic, from “Boardwalk Empire” to the comic-book noir of the upcoming “The Penguin.”
“My Brilliant Friend” was never a mainstream hit in this country. But it may in a way be the true successor to “The Sopranos.” I don’t mean the superficial connection to Italy, but rather the way it depicts emotional and physical violence with equal intensity. (There was no mob hit more vicious than the breakup between Tony and Carmela in the episode “Whitecaps.”)
Both shows, above all, have a visceral sense of the weight of family and history. The past is a black hole: No amount of success can keep you from being sucked downward by the pain of a childhood slight, the memory of a betrayal, the judgment of a mother.
You can leave the old neighborhood, “My Brilliant Friend” knows, but you can’t get away from it. To quote the “Godfather” movies, as “The Sopranos” loved to do: It pulls you back in.
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