My Brilliant Friend eps 3 & 4 review, Culture Whisper
Lila’s smile takes many different forms. In episodes three and four, it’s a resistance: against her abusive husband, against the patriarchal cynicism about her. It can be cruel, dissolving the happiness of those closest to her. And, most memorably of all, it can be frightening: revealing a scary elation that would send the clown from IT to run and hide.
Lila’s fractured personality is what makes her so endlessly alluring and confusing: being the ultimate good in one scene; sadistically hurtful in the next. You can’t even blink when she enters a room.
But she is consistent in defying the misogynistic systems that have taken over her life. She can even bend the shady Solaro family into her way of seeing things, even as she’s relegated to working at the newly opened Carracci grocery store. When she fixes an issue in the shoe shop, which she helped build, Elena watches with quiet admiration – her retrospective voice-over narrating with poetic precision (‘a thought would arrive from deep inside her and burn her brain’).
