'My Brilliant Friend' Season 2 Episode 6 Promo: Lila's affair with Nino grows while Lenu leaves neighborhood
When we last saw the girls in 'The Betrayal', their friendship had hit rock bottom. Lenu decided not to meet Lila or Nino, nursing a broken heart, while Stephano looked more like a jailor than a husband to his wayward wife.
The promo for episode 6 shows that some time has passed since then. Enough time for Lila to get a smart new haircut and for Lila to break her vow to herself to go meet Nino and Lila. Lila's affair with Nino shows no signs of stopping and grows more torrid. The promo shows the lovers kissing in the rain, apparently not caring about what the neighborhood's busybodies might think. Lila tells Lenu, with steely conviction in her eyes says that she "can't bear living apart from him anymore", while Lenu, hesitantly asks her what she is planning to do.
Stephano is shown brooding in the dark, drink in hand, while Lila looks at a knife in the kitchen. Does that mean Lila is finally ready to dole out some violence and vengeance of her own? Has her affair emboldened her enough to harm Stephano? While this is still up for speculation, Nino will definitely be seeing some violence in the upcoming episode. He gets beaten up by an old face that pops up -- Antonio. Last we saw of him, he was conscripted to the army and broke up with Lenu for trying to get the Solaras brothers to help him avoid getting drafted.
He was also simmering with jealousy because he realized that Lenu was attracted to Nino. So it is ironic, that he seems to be instigated by Michele Solara to beat up Nino for Lila's adulterous relationship with him. In last week's episode, we had already seen how sons become their fathers and Nino is well on his way to earning his reputation as a womanizer. Not to forget, Antonio is also Melina's son -- the same Melina who was loved and abandoned by the married Donato Sarratore, Nino's father.
There has to be an element of familial revenge involved as Antonio pounds Nino's face, bloodying him up as he rages at him, asking, "you like taking other guys' women?" Unlike the girls, he sees a pattern in Nino's behavior. He sees a pattern in Nino paying attention to Lenu and turning her head and then embarking on an affair with a married Lila, discontent with his then-girlfriend Nadia. In fact, Nino breaks up with Nadia only because Lila sees the letter Nadia sent him and insists he break up with her. If not, he would have felt a little guilty about stringing Nadia along but wouldn't have broken up with her, even as he fell into his torrid affair with Lila.
The promo also shows Nino and Lila living together is a small cramped flat because as a university student Nino is hardly able to give Lila the lifestyle Stephano gave her. We also see Lila look like she is about to throw up -- the visual cue so often used to signify pregnancy. As always, in Ferrante's world, women's bodies betray them even before others can.
While Lenu has been unable to keep herself away from Lila and Nino, she does keep the other promise to herself -- that she will stop living for others and live for herself instead. We see her face the faculty at her university who tell her that they hope she will "keep studying". When she comes back home, her desire to study further will ignite a war of words with her mother who thinks she has studied enough.
Tired of always being held back by her mother, who is partly jealous of Lenu getting opportunities she never did, Lenu explodes at the dinner table. She tells her mother angrily, "I've always done what you wanted. Now I decide!" The vacation at Ischia is precisely what Lenu needed to stop living in Lila's shadow and to strike out on her own. We also see her in a train taking her far away from the claustrophobic neighborhood she grew up in where she can take charge of her life, away from Lila's scrutiny and influence and away from the poverty and violence her mother no longer has the chance to escape. Both girls, in different ways, are defying their destinies.
'My Brilliant Friend' airs on Mondays on HBO at 10/9c.