My joy is finally back!
There were two shows that I waited for two years — not Westworld.
Now, these two quasi-divine dramas are about to be broadcast in the first half of the year.
One is Netflix's current ace, and the first half will be broadcast on April 18 (guess which one it is).
One is HBO's current ace, which is currently airing.
What else can be said? It's over————
My Genius Girlfriend Season 3
2022.2.6.Italy
The play is based on the novel of the same name by Italian writer Elena Ferrante (pen name), in total, four novels.
With its authentic and delicate brushstrokes and encompassing vientiane content, the book swept the world, being translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 10 million copies.
HBO's adaptation was also very successful.
Scenes, soundtracks, casting, lots of close-ups that create a psychological atmosphere for gazing...
Almost perfectly restored the grand and personal characteristics of the original work.
The score on Douban, 9.3 in the first season and 9.5 in the second season, has been raised step by step.
Now that the third season has aired, just two episodes, more than 5,000 people have given a high score of 9.7.
To be honest, as long as the core content continues to be grasped, it is difficult for this drama to end badly.
What is the core content? It is already clear in the original book.
Although the entire story spans more than half a century, the location spans Naples, Florence, Turin and other cities, and the content of the story involves characters from all walks of life and aspects of society.
But the most basic, but also the most core, can still be summarized into seven words -
One city, two women.
>>>> a homeland that is difficult to escape
The city is their homeland.
It is a dilapidated old town on the outskirts of Naples.
It's always dusty, noisy, and noisy, like people's lives, full of chaos and violence.
Bullies are overbearing and can openly beat people half to death at church doors.
The common people could only swallow their anger.
"Our world is like this, full of deadly words: asthma, tetanus, poison gas, war, machine tools, ruins, work, bombing, bombing, tuberculosis and infection."
Poverty is the norm here, violence is the language here.
Men are irritable and irritable, fists and feet are added at every turn, and bloodshed occurs from time to time.
Although women are not as violent as men, they should also quarrel, scold, and beat.
Under the bully is the common people, and under the common people are women.
Since childhood I have imagined a very tiny animal, barely visible to the naked eye, that would come to our residential area at night, from ponds, from abandoned train cars, from stinky grass, frogs, salamanders, flies, stones and dust, and they would enter the water we drank, the food we ate, the air we breathed. These tiny bugs can make our mothers and grandmothers as irritable as vicious dogs. They are more susceptible to this disease than men, men keep getting angry, and eventually they will calm down, but women, they are quiet on the surface, calm, but they will be angry to the end, can't stop.
People are busy living, busy dying.
The poor are poor, the rich are rich, generation after generation, and the cycle begins.
The vast majority of people were subject to the rules of the old city and were accustomed to it.
However, Lennon and Lila are two exceptions.
Group photo of young childhood actors, left: Lennon, right: Lila
>>>> twins
Lennon was the eldest daughter of the concierge.
She is a good girl in people's minds, with a gentle personality and a knowledgeable dalit.
But her impression of her hometown was not very good.
She was afraid of the feeling of chaos and violence that the whole city brought to her.
She feared that she would one day become a foul-looking, foul-mouthed, foul-mouthed woman like her mother.
Lennon did not have the courage and strength to resist these.
Until she met Lila.
Lila is the daughter of a shoemaker family.
She is the bad girl that people think of, grumpy and rebellious.
But her academic performance was surprisingly good, and she was talented.
She seems to be the kind of "genius" that the title calls.
Because of his grades, Lennon noticed Lila.
But what really attracted Lennon was the innate steadfastness and bravery that Lila had.
She can face bullies and power without timidity, and always let go of what she wants.
This is the quality that Lennon lacks and aspires to.
So she was inevitably attracted to Lila and eventually became her best friend.
Lennon felt as if she were following Lila step by step, so that she could draw on Lila's courage and escape from her hometown.
Together, they bought "Little Women" in the bookstore and regarded it as a treasure.
Together, they imagined becoming writers like in novels one day, living happily by writing.
They are jealous of each other, they worship each other, they inspire and trigger each other's hopes and passions.
They originated in the same place, but did not follow the same path.
Because Lila's family was even poorer, she could not afford to study.
Perhaps part of the reason is that Lila never shows weakness, so she can't win her father's sympathy.
All in all, Lennon's father promised to allow her to continue her to junior high school.
Lila was thrown down the stairs by her father through the window and broke into a broken bone.
Their lives began to diverge from here, embarking on different escape journeys.
Lila had been resisting.
Without letting her read, she turned to designing shoes;
The mafia wanted to marry her, so she switched to another wealthy family;
The rich man deceived her, and she ran to her imaginary love...
Lennon has been in a daze to steadily realize his childhood dream of escaping from his hometown.
The dream she had had with Lila.
The entire Neapolitan quadrilogy is about the friendship of two people for more than half a century.
And the story of trying to escape from their hometown.
>>>> left, left behind
The story of the third season immediately follows the end of the second season.
Lennon published his first book and gained some fame.
Her fiancé came from a prestigious family and became a university professor at a young age, and her future was limitless.
Her life, seeing that everything is about to go on the right track.
As the title of the third part of the original book, "Left, Left", Lennon is the one who left.
Her world was full of smiles.
What was left was Lila.
In order to protect the children, she left her original husband and followed her friend Enzo to live in another district.
During the day, both work in a nearby factory.
In the evenings, Lila would accompany Enzo in teaching herself computer programming.
Enzo loves Lila deeply, but the two are not lovers, lila just enjoys the balance now.
Because she is not good at getting along with people, Lila has not suffered less.
Always being called around, being sneered at and ridiculed, and being sexually harassed in all kinds.
The working environment is also too bad to work.
Soak in sausage water for eight hours a day.
Go to the freezer at minus twenty degrees to work just to earn an extra 10 liras per hour.
She was still resisting.
Resist the flirtation of the workers, resist the sexual assault of the boss.
But when she plucked up the courage to ask her boss for better wages and working conditions, she found that the factory already owed money to Solara's family.
Going around, he ended up working for the family he hated the most.
So, under the double pressure of psychology and physiology, Lila fell ill.
She felt that she was about to die soon, so she called Lennon and wanted to leave her alone...
>>>> shift in center of gravity
The third season is markedly different from the previous two seasons.
On the one hand, Italy at this time was in a very turbulent period, and the social background ran through the lives of the two heroines in a non-negligible manner.
In fact, as early as the first two seasons, there are many seemingly idle preparations.
For example, Lennon takes Lila to a party at the teacher's house and passionately discusses how to bring about social change.
For example, Lennon's boyfriend in college is a radical who does not care about his studies at all.
Specific here will not be expanded, interested in to search for a search.
In addition to respecting the background of the times, the addition of social background also has a very important metaphorical role -
Chaos and violence did not exist only in the old town of Naples, but in the whole society, the whole era at that time.
On the other hand, the center of gravity of the third part began to be biased towards Lennon.
Although the narrator of the entire story has always been Lennon, the first two seasons have clearly been more focused on Lila.
In her own narrative, she will always be the one who runs hard behind Lila.
But as Lila said to Lennon before she got married: You're my genius girlfriend.
This is the first time the story points out, and it is also a sudden reversal.
It reminds the audience that all along, we follow Lennon's perspective to see Lila and feel that she is unstoppable.
But if you can stand in Lila's eyes, maybe this is not the case.
The first episode of the first season.
The two went down to the cellar to find the doll, but to no avail, they decided to go together to face the evil people in the neighborhood they imagined.
This is the first and most critical event when they become good friends in the true sense of the word.
And if you pay attention to the look in Lila's eyes in the play, in fact, she should have found the doll at this moment.
This is a hint that the director jumped out of the narrative perspective of Lennon in the original work and secretly took the bootleg goods to the audience.
Lila may never have wanted to be as determined and brave as Lenon had imagined.
Instead, Lennon, with the courage given to her by the imaginary Lila, walked forward step by step, tortuously and slowly.
All along, Lennon has been in a state of extreme self-identification, accustomed to self-deprecation.
She has attached her value to others for most of her life, loving people, studying, writing...
And, of course, the most important thing, Lila.
It was always what Lila did, and Lennon followed suit.
Lila taught herself, she was angry, Lila got married, she took her boyfriend to the small broken house to steal.
But now it's different, and Lila is showing more and more moments of vulnerability.
Lennon is also about to face a series of problems such as marriage, love, and having children.
She wouldn't leave everything behind like Lila, and their situations were different.
She can only experience all this in her own way, through the confusion of various stages such as marriage, love and child creation, and then grow up, she can no longer rely on Lila.
The reason why she met Nino at the beginning was also to lay the groundwork for future derailments.
Lennon and Lila, two different lives, end up on the same end.
That is, to truly achieve freedom and independence.
The disappearance of >>>> boundaries
For Lennon, this freedom means getting out of Lila's shadow and completing the self-construction.
This is also the focus of the next three seasons.
For Lila, this freedom means getting out of this mundane world.
Remember the beginning of the episode?
The origin of the story is Lila's sudden disappearance.
Lennon, who was already full of white hair, felt angry and decided to write down his and Lila's bits and pieces.
One question is, why did Lila disappear instead of die?
I think it's probably because Lila's life dynamic is closer to a passion than to the desires of ordinary people.
There is a very interesting setting in the original book, which may support this -
Lila can be extremely fanatical for love, leaving everything behind and eloping with Nino.
But she couldn't feel the thrill of having sex with Nino.
This is also hinted at in the first episode of the third season
Lila intuitively felt the "disappearance of boundaries" and the depravity and fragmentation of the world.
But Lennon can't, she is better at accepting the discipline of the world and adjusting herself in real time to respond.
Lennon envied Lila, we all knew.
But doesn't Lila envy Lennon? I doubt it.
When the factory owner scolded her, she would obviously learn to show weakness:
I still have children, I won't report you, you believe me.
However, this kind of painting the tiger according to the cat can only be a shallow taste after all, and it is difficult to continue.
This is true for Lila, and it is also true for Lennon.
They all expect each other to live out their ideals.
Without Lila, Lennon wouldn't have thought of leaving Naples, and without Lennon, Lila's body and mind would have been locked in Naples.
But in the end, they can only complete their own independent journey in their own way.
At the end of the book, Lennon completed her novel.
The last thing she said was: Now that Lila has surfaced so clearly, I should give up and continue looking for her.
In this battle, both men are winners.
Lennon won because she had written down Lila's appearance.
Lila wins because she has achieved her dream of disappearing.