Elena Ferrante: a masterful final for “the prodigious friend”

Long-term adaptation of the Best Sellers River of Elena Ferrante, the luxurious co-production of the RAI, HBO and Canal + had been a little lost sight of. Breaking, the fourth season breathtaking. And not only because the distribution has been fully renewed, the actress Alba Rohrwacher lends in particular her Florentine features in Elena.

Neapolitan friends now have the regrets of their almost 50 years. With their heavy luggage of lovers and betrayals, secrets and blended families, Elena alias Lenù and Lila find themselves in the district of their childhood. The fourth volume, “the lost child”, picks them in the suspicious reunion of a total but always complicated complicity.

One of the attractions of these final episodes is undoubtedly to see the ferrant writer, the most mysterious novelist From the beginning of the XXI^e century, expose its creative processes. “Without knowing it,” notes in voice as its double, lila in the chaos of its confidences gave me the keys to my own functioning. He herself had not access to it… ”

A woman’s soul

There is a lot of magic in these confessions with decryption so clear compared to the sophistication developed in the saga. For the record, despite more or less conclusive surveys, the real identity of Elena ferrant remains haloed with enigmatic sails.

What does it matter since its truths are lying between the pages of the loves of “the prodigious friend”. Especially when in this masterful final, it is not so much for the Romanesque historian to deploy the mues of a nation through the microcosm of a Neapolitan town, as to deliver the soul of a woman in her triumphs and her darkness.

This fourth and last season thus twirls between supposed, fantasized, abdicated paternity, disowned or accomplished maternity, the dilemmas posed by the body and the mind of women with more sharp acuity than those of their companions males.

And yet, Elena Ferranteif she quotes Elsa Morante and other feminists, remains deeply attached to her free will, marginal paradoxical among all, detached from the groups and militancy of the intellectual circles of the 80s.

Of course, this undecrotable observer mats a society anchored in a conservatism of Catholic obedience, torn between its desires of democracy and its links with the mafia. The world has recorded the seismic tremors caused by the generations of the years 1960-197o, which the previous seasons were framed.

Shocks in Naples

But halfway through, in episode 4, it is the earthquake suffered by Naples in 1980 which gave the tempo. The district vacillates in all its foundations to the point of engulfing its children. At the edge of the volcano, nothing is certain, not even utopia.

In appearance, the incandescent Lila – embodied here by Irene Maorino, former “Gomorrah” – seems to have conquered his freedom of local “big boss”. Even if it means cutting up on his ideals, to fight with the Solara brothers. Eternal dissatisfied shares with Elena as tangible frustrations as wrinkles that dig their faces.

Indeed, the independent Elena, divorced with three children, cannot savor her success. Critical towards her literary successes, torn by a love that deceives her, children who monopolize her, a vocation that resists, the “wise false virgin” suffocates flamboyant impulses.

Always treated in his reconstructions, the cycle of “the prodigious friend”, launched in 2018, has often benefited from a staging clawed by prestigious filmmakers. Paolo Sorrentino shoulders here Laura Bispuri, succeeding Alice Rohrwacher or Daniele Luchetti.

In this monumental work, faced with an extraordinary tetralogy, the segments remain uneven. Let’s face the seasons 2 and 3, such as a dramatic soft belly, discouraged enthusiasm by their school fidelity. This smooth perfection justly that jealous Lila while contemplating her friend Elena, who now excites her mocking remarks. And which explodes in cruel self -mockery.

Our note: 4 stars

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