Lenù and Lila can hardly be faulted for responding with a passive rage when faced with the limitations of their era, a time when women like them were expected to do little more than bear children to often abusive husbands. In its own way, this rage informs the girls’ fascinating, volatile relationship with each other. Their friendship is one that seems to fuel every manner of emotion—jealousy, fear, desperation, desire, and affection—as the girls work to envision a better future for themselves. The onscreen version of Lenù and Lila’s Naples feels closed off and Fellini-esque, with surreal backdrops and grotesque characters such as the lovelorn Melina and the predatory Donato. Just like the tunnel that separates the girls from the rest of the city, their poverty cuts them off from the outside world, also keeping their parents from imagining a different life for themselves or their children.

In contrast, Matteo and Nicola are both well educated and championed by their family from the start; the young men are aware of their relative privilege and of how society will define them by it. Their disappointment over the failed kidnapping of Giorgia sends them careening in different directions after they abandon plans to take a post-graduation trip together through Europe. Nicola gets as far as Norway’s Arctic Circle, while Matteo, praised as a brilliant literature student, leaves academics to enlist in the army. A few months later, the brothers reunite in Florence in November of 1966, during the flooding of the Arno River. They join the legions of volunteers who had come to rescue Florence’s priceless works of art, and who would come to be known as angeli del fango or “angels of the mud.” For many young people, this event would be their first taste of a lifetime of activism, and The Best of Youth is at its most relevant when it traces the brothers’ path toward that future.

As Matteo and Nicola grow older, the film depicts how the hopes of their generation—literally “the best of youth,” as in the title, taken from a Pier Paolo Pasolini poem—played out on both political and personal levels. The movie’s explicit examination of class privilege and responsibility will be familiar to many Italians who came of age in the postwar decades. Marco Cupolo, an associate professor at the University of Hartford, discusses this debate in his essay on The Best of Youth: “Would authenticity and unselfishness of emerging, well-educated classes lead the reforms of Italian institutions and society? What kind of moral values were young Italians looking for during the 1960s and 1970s?”

These questions call to mind a discussion that Lenù and Lila have with their peers in My Brilliant Friend’s fourth episode (“Dissolving Margins”) about whether to abandon their parents’ old rivalries in favor of neighborhood unity. “Our fathers did bad things,” says Lenù, as they discuss whether to accept a party invitation from the son of Don Achille, the feared neighborhood loan shark, “but we, their children, should be different.” Though the teenagers couldn’t have known it, their debate mirrored the social pressures that young people were confronting all across Italy.