Photo: Eduardo Castaldo/HBO
In the aftermath of the earthquake that shook many of the structures of Italy’s southern cities loose, Lenù’s deliberately removed life from the neighborhood — a separation that hurt Lila’s feelings but proved essential to give Lenù a sense of stability –– falls into one of the foundational cracks. Worried about her mother, whose condition is worsening, and drawn in by the shared experience of pregnancy with Lila, Lenù finds herself once again entangled in the streets of her childhood. Still, she attempts to protect the theater of her life with Nino on Via Petrarca –– he might have disappointed her by abandoning her to face the earthquake alone, but like a Jenga tower with missing blocks, she hopes the whole thing won’t collapse if she’s careful enough.
Instead, Lenù is getting affection from other spheres of her life. Softened by illness, Immacolata treats her with new, open tenderness: she asks her to eat more meat, be stronger in preparation for her imminent delivery. Her surprising warmth also extends to her other children; she’s still worried about Peppe and Gianni, and she once again asks Lenù if Lila can help them. Lenù is honest about what Lila told her, that she’s busy enough with Gennaro, but promises to find a better solution for her brothers. A glimpse of her old self flashing through her new frailty, Immacolata retreats into herself, shifting the guilt of her sons’ demise on Lenù, who never helped them study, who always kept her distance. Through the frosted glass of the bathroom door, director Laura Bispuri frames Lenù and Immacolata over their respective shoulders, as if they were each other’s angel and devil.
The guilt-shaming works on Lenù. Leaving the apartment, she catches sight of Peppe dealing drugs and decides to take matters into her own hands. As if they were kids again, Lenù lectures him with the authority of an older sibling: what could he possibly be thinking, getting involved in this? Has he no conscience? Lenù tries to reverse-Uno-card Immacolata’s guilt trip onto Peppe: he’ll kill their mother with worry. But if it weren’t for the money he is making working with the neighborhood’s crooked figures, he rebuts, Immacolata would be dead already.
Lenù’s return to the neighborhood is filled with moments like these, when she realizes that in her absence, the conflicts she was only vaguely aware of have become too intricate for her to understand, making her essentially an outsider. She might have thought she understood what the deal was with Alfonso and Lila and their role-playing game, but when she visits the Basic Sight office, she’s once again puzzled by the strange erotic current that pulls along the relationship between Lila, Alfonso, and Michele. She waits for her friend in the company of Alfonso, presenting more feminine than ever, and Michele, who we see here for the first time since the cast switch. He shakes Lenù’s hand with unusual formality and impatiently shuts down Alfonso’s attempts to lighten the conversation. Lenù tries her best to connect with him by bringing up all of their separations from their spouses, but Michele is not in the mood to commiserate: “People have to do what they feel like or they get sick,” he says, which sounds suspiciously like one of Lila’s formulations. Under the impression the Solara brothers aren’t presently getting along, Lenù takes the liberty to complain about her brothers’ business with Marcello. But Michele tells her she’s wrong. He defends his brother, and the air gets so thick with tension that not even Lila’s authoritative arrival can quite dispel it. Proving her power over Michele, she makes him wait –– she will talk with Lenù first.
If before, Lila seemed hurt that Lenù would purposefully try to distance herself from the neighborhood, now she’s singing a different tune: Lenù should stay out of their mess if she plans to always return to her ivory tower on Via Petrarca, where the stakes are low and abstract. But Lenù can’t quite ignore the neighborhood’s politics if she’s going to help her brothers out from under the Solaras’ wing for her mother’s sake. To put Immacolata at ease, Lila says, Lenù should just lie; there’s no more powerful tranquilizer. When Lenù asks if Lila lies to her, too, Lila barks back: “None are deafer than those who will not listen.”
In other words, the fragility of Lenù’s relationship with Nino is closing in, and if earlier she was able to tune it out and focus on the satisfaction of finally having Nino’s love, now it’s becoming harder to ignore the faults of their agreement. More than that, those faults are becoming clearer to Dede and Elsa, too. When he leaves the conclusion of a bedtime story for the next night, Elsa protests: “What if you don’t come?” The imminent arrival of their baby also means that Lenù is starting to worry about how Nino, father of a million different neglected children, will act once she gives birth. Does he ever think about Mirko, Silvia’s son, who looks just like him? Is he ever in contact with that boy? Nino tries to give her a women-are-incomprehensible routine –– “I don’t know what you want!” –– but it won’t work, not on this feminist thinker. More insultingly even, Nino blames Lenù’s “irrationality” on Lila, whose presence in Lenù’s life, he says, makes her stupider. It’s the last straw: she tells him to get out. As if to remind her that he doesn’t need her, he leaves with a shrug. He’ll always have some place to go.
Lenù dreams of another earthquake and wakes up to contractions. The first person she calls right before her water breaks? Pietro. We were all once harsh on Pietro –– he wasn’t very helpful when, as a young and new mother, Lenù had to take care of the children all night while he worked, shut away in his office; his family’s snotty classism is inexcusable; and he could have picked up a sock every once in a while. Compared to Nino, though, he has all the domestic talent of a stay-at-home-husband. He asks Lenù how she is and promises to get the girls the next day. Though the following steps in Lenù’s journey to the hospital are punctuated by painful, seizing contractions, she goes through the motions with remarkable serenity. She picks up the baby bag, gets the neighbor to watch her sleeping daughters, and drives herself to the hospital. She cries in pain throughout but does fine –– she can count on herself.
Having done so much alone, it’s almost surprising when, after she delivers a perfect little baby girl, Nino walks in through the door. Because she is delusional with blind love, the sight of him makes her smile in relief. Nino feeds her all the old lines –– I can’t live without you, etc –– and gifts her a dainty necklace. He looks pretty satisfied with himself for doing literally the bare minimum, but even then, Pietro’s kindness on the phone, whose gist he only gets through Lenù’s responses, makes him uncomfortable with inadequacy. Uncharacteristically, Nino wants the baby to be baptized. Lenù is amused by his traditionalism, but it wouldn’t be fair to her other children, who weren’t baptized. Instead, they decide they’ll throw a party.
Having a baby together throws the confusion of their arrangement as a couple into stark relief: they struggle to explain the terms of their lives to the official registering the baby. Are they married? What’s their address? Have they come up with a name for the baby, at least? Buoyed by the joy of having a new baby, they laugh about their laissez-faire approach to coupledom and register their daughter as Immacolata Sarratore. Speaking of Immacolata: as soon as an exhausted Lenù gets home with the baby, Lila calls to say she’s coming over with Lenù’s mother. Lenù’s effort to make a separation between her Via Petrarca and neighborhood lives, which she would carefully merge at the party for the newborn, goes down the drain. Immacolata won’t hear it: she wants to meet her new granddaughter right away.
But if it seems that Lenù’s desire to protect the early days of her daughter’s life from the influence of the neighborhood is based on a superstition that, by doing so, she is setting for Imma an easier, less turbulent fate, in truth what she is really worried about is that Nino, who is home for once, will see Lila being all hot while Lenù is still weary from giving birth. In an effort to remedy this disaster, she puts on way too much blush, which I thought was an inspired detail: who among us hasn’t lost control of the brush? I’ve been loving the subtle ways that the show has been humanizing Lenù with this kind of visual clue.
When Lila and Immacolata get there, Nino charms the old lady by pointing out the beautiful landmarks of their extraordinary view while Lenù takes her friend to see the baby. Lila fusses over little Imma, smells her and jokes that if her baby doesn’t come out as good, they’ll do a swap. When Immacolata learns that her granddaughter will bear her name, she can hardly believe it, choking up with emotion. She suggests they call her Imma, which is more modern, and carefully nestles the baby in her frail arms. Lenù is so moved by the sweet interaction between her baby and her mom that she almost forgets to worry about Nino and Lila making coffee in the kitchen –– almost. Coming back into the living room, Lila stares at the ground, and following her gaze, Lenù is shaken out of her trance. There is blood pooling underneath her mother’s shoes.
What happens next is a whirlwind. As if sensing that shit just hit the fan, the baby starts crying. Lila goes to call an ambulance, but Nino thinks it’ll be faster to drive them in the car. The doctor treating Immacolata knows Nino through Eleonora, so Lenù agrees it will be best if he goes to the hospital, where Immacolata is begging not to be taken. Surprising everyone, Nino calls: Lila, let’s go. Lila tells Lenù to go herself and leave her the baby, but Nino insists that it’ll be better if Lenù stays with Imma, and after all, it’s true that she’ll have to feed her. Lila searches Lenù’s eyes for guidance. Lenù tells her to go and call from the hospital, and it’s only when they leave that she registers “the wound of that situation. Lila and Nino together again, taking [her] mother away.”
For the next several hours, Lenù struggles to separate fact from fiction. If she had trained her mind not to obsess over what Nino might get up to in her absence, knowing that he’s alone with Lila sends her into a spiral. The show cleverly plays this up by making Lenù’s tortured fantasies indistinguishable from reality, cutting between her shifting, nervous eyes and what is or might be happening at the hospital: do Lila and Nino really hold hands in the car? Does he drape his arms over her shoulder? Does he whisper into her ear? Trying to ignore the noise of her own speculations, Lenù busies herself: she cleans up the blood and calls her sister Elisa to tell her their mother is in the hospital (drunk with newfound importance after taking up with Marcello, Elisa chews Lenù out with unnecessary hostility), puts her baby to sleep.
When Lila finally calls with news, she tells Lenù that Immacolata has been admitted, but no one can stay with her. Lenù should try to relax: Immacolata won’t die, at least not now. Lenù can’t stop herself from asking what Nino and Lila are doing, masking her suspicion with concern for the bureaucracies of her mother’s hospital stay. Lila reassures her friend that she’ll leave soon and tells her to rest so her milk won’t dry up. It eases Lenù’s mind for a few minutes until Lila calls again to say that Marcello is at the hospital throwing a fit. He wants to transfer Immacolata into a private clinic so she can be more comfortable, the same way Lenù and Elisa both sought out clinics to give birth. But the fate of Immacolata’s treatment becomes a battle of principle between Nino and Marcello, with Lila taking Nino’s side. The argument among them escalates, with Lenù being able to only half-understand it through the phone: Lila yells at Marcello to fuck off, Marcello threatens to break someone’s legs, Nino begs her to try and talk some sense into people’s minds. The whole thing becomes a mass of incomprehensible aggression, and meanwhile all Lenù can really think about is whether or not Nino and Lila are rekindling their old flame in the middle of it all. It doesn’t help that, when Lenù orders Nino to just come home, he argues he can’t leave Lila alone with “that animal.” Screaming at this point, Lenù tells him that Lila knows very well how to fight off a Solara.
But when Nino finally gets home, still incensed by Marcello and his insanity, the narrowness of Lenù’s obsession makes her feel selfish and inadequate. And it’s true: while she worried, Lila was tricking Marcello into thinking she left and sneaking into Immacolata’s room to hold her through the night. In the morning, she calls Lenù to tell her that she’ll wait until Marcello and Elisa arrive and only then go home, exhausted as she must be in the final month of her pregnancy. Lenù is concerned about and grateful for her friend, but their intimacy is punctured by Nino. Walking into the living room, he wants to speak with Lila to see if she’s okay. Lenù hangs up on Lila before Nino can get to the phone, and looking up into his eyes with the vestiges of her crazed, Dr. Bill Hartford-level jealousy, she asks: “What does Lila got to do with it?”
• The way the slow piano soundtrack underscored the frenzy of the hospital scenes, I thought, was brilliant: so off-putting in reminding us of the dissonance between Lenù’s out-of-control fantasies in her apartment and the reality of what was going on in the hospital.
