The Rai/HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s revered quartet of Neapolitan novels returns for its third season (it’s been out, truthfully, for a while now), and if anything it’s even more impressive than seasons one and two.
My Brilliant Friend, which is both the title of the first novel and of the overall series, follows Lenu (as in Elena) and Lila as they move through childhood into adulthood and maturity.
With one leaving the squalor and corruption of the impoverished neighbourhood in Naples where they grow up to become a successful novelist. And the other staying behind to stand in defiance against everything that bares down on her in those unforgiving environs.
And through all the men, and sex, and births and betrayals and success and failure, the one thing that holds firm is the depth of their fierce friendship, forged as it was in fire of youth.
Ferrante’s tetralogy occupies a curious space. Like the novels of Bret Easton Ellis and Philip Roth, they’re clearly and unapologetically literary, but they’re far too successful to be classed as purely literary. The closest comparison is probably Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.
Remarkably, the television series not only does justice to the original, if anything it improves on it. And it’ll be interesting to see what they do to correct the fact that, between ourselves, the fourth of the novels isn’t quite as unputdownable as the previous three, and rather drifts off.
What My Brilliant Friend does so successfully is to use the close up of its intimate portraits of two female friends and set them against the backdrop of everything that was happening in Italy. As it moves from the conservatism of the 50s, to the vibrancy of the 60s and the agitation of the 70s.
What the television series does, even more impressively, is to present us with an unromanticised picture of how harsh life can be for all too ordinary people living on the periphery. But to do so by moulding exquisitely crafted images with meticulously combined sounds. The result is both viscerally real, and at once gloriously cinematic and defiantly romantic.
My Brilliant Friend proves that not everything that has happened in the world of film and television is all bad. A century ago, you would have had to go to a bespoke, art house cinema to find fare such as this. Films determined to zoom in on the very local but to do so in widescreen technicolour cinemascope.
Like the Sicily we’re presented with in Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, or the Provence of Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, or with De Sica’s pair of roving, working class lovers in Sunflower (reviewed by me earlier here).
Today, it’s not only readily available on a television near you, there are four seasons of eight episodes each. And each one is completely and compellingly believable and at once triumphantly and gloriously escapist.
Watch the trailer to My Brilliant Friend here
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