Season 3 of the sumptuous “My Brilliant Friend”

June 7, 2024 by Leave a Comment

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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Filed Under: Books, Television Tagged With: , , ,

“The Curse”, almost unwatchable, completely unmissable

April 6, 2024 by Leave a Comment

The Curse, a 10 part com­e­dy dra­ma, or dram­e­dy if you will, is the ulti­mate in car-crash tele­vi­sion. It’s hor­ren­dous­ly uncom­fort­able to have to watch, and yet you can’t take your eyes off of it. 

Cre­at­ed, writ­ten and pro­duced by a com­bi­na­tion of its three prin­ci­pals, the series revolves around the mar­riage of Emma Stone and Nathan Field­er, and the real­i­ty TV show his col­lege friend Ben­ny Safdie is mak­ing about them and the work they do. 

Stone and Field­er are a patch­work quilt of every con­ceiv­able lib­er­al urge. They buy up prop­er­ties in under-ser­viced, periph­er­al sub­urbs – i.e. the ones where black and brown skinned peo­ple eke out their mea­gre exis­tences — and replace exist­ing dwellings with eco-friend­ly, ultra-mod­ern and over-priced monstrosities. 

Their end­less talk of invest­ing in local com­mu­ni­ties and nur­tur­ing indige­nous tal­ent does noth­ing to hide the fact that all they are in fact engaged in is a rapa­cious gen­tri­fi­ca­tion scheme designed to make them a shed-load of mon­ey, that they’re try­ing for­lorn­ly to dress up in lib­er­al frills and bows.

The Safdie broth­ers’ Good Time.

As the episodes progress, each aspect of their arche­typ­al­ly lib­er­al façade is unmasked to reveal a mon­strous mess of neu­ro­sis fed on an entrenched sense of enti­tled privilege.

And through­out all of which, it’s – at least ini­tial­ly – unclear whether Safdie intends glee­ful­ly expos­ing this in the real­i­ty show he’s mak­ing around their exploits. Or whether he too is caught up in the glare of their ambi­tion and the vor­tex of their solipsism. 

Could he con­ceiv­ably turn out to be even more self-cen­tred than they are? Or is there the chance that some­thing inter­est­ing might actu­al­ly result from what he’s shooting?

We are then very much on the same ter­rain that Ricky Ger­vais mapped out in the orig­i­nal The Office series, and where Curb Your Enthu­si­asm went in some of its ear­li­er episodes. Gen­uine­ly painful to behold, and absolute­ly riveting. 

This is what tele­vi­sion can do when three incred­i­bly gift­ed indi­vid­u­als decide to pool their tal­ents to expose what lies under­ground, beneath the sur­face of the soci­ety we’ve con­struct­ed for our­selves. And the less you know about any of the par­tic­u­lars, the more you’ll get out of watch­ing it. 

Watch the trail­er for The Curse here:

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Filed Under: Television Tagged With: , ,

The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs, the 1998 TV Series

December 1, 2023 by 3 Comments

Nor­ma Per­cy has pro­duced doc­u­men­taries on some the world’s most volatile regions, with The Death of Yugoslavia (1995), Iran and the West (2009), The Iraq War (2013) and most recent­ly, Putin Vs the West (2023), which was reviewed by me ear­li­er here. 

But in 1998 she made a six part series on what is sure­ly the most con­test­ed cor­ner of the entire globe; The 50 Years War: Israel and the Arabs.

What Per­cy man­ages to do, some­how, is to per­suade prac­ti­cal­ly every sin­gle one of the prin­ci­ple play­ers to sit down and talk to her, on the record. The rea­son they agree to do so is that she allows them to artic­u­late their views, what­ev­er they are, which she presents in a trans­par­ent and entire­ly neu­tral manner. 

Here, we hear from a host of Israeli defence, for­eign and prime min­is­ters, includ­ing Ben­jamin Netanyahu, Shi­mon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, a wide range of com­bat­ants, nego­tia­tors and min­sters from both the PLO and a num­ber of its splin­ter groups, from for­mer U.S. pres­i­dents Jim­my Carter, George Bush and Bill Clin­ton, from for­mer KGB oper­a­tives, Jordan’s King Hus­sein and from an array of senior diplo­mat­ic and mil­i­tary fig­ures from every cor­ner of the region.

It’s both com­pre­hen­sive and con­sis­tent­ly illu­mi­nat­ing, with prob­a­bly the most sur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion being the fact that it was in fact the Rus­sians who’d qui­et­ly trig­gered the Six-Day War in June of 1967.

They’d looked at how stretched the Amer­i­cans were over in Viet­nam, and had con­clud­ed that open­ing up a sec­ond war front in the Mid­dle East could be the final nail in their cof­fin. So they put a great deal of effort into con­vinc­ing every­one in the region that the Israelis were amass­ing troops on their bor­der with Syr­ia. Which, plain­ly, they were not. 

They even went so far as to try and con­vince the Israelis that that was what they were doing, even though they knew per­fect­ly well that they were mak­ing the whole thing up!

Then, in the after­math of that war, after Yass­er Arafat and the PLO had plant­ed them­selves in Jor­dan, a fac­tion with­in the PLO took it upon them­selves to go to war with their hosts, on the grounds that they clear­ly weren’t being suf­fi­cient­ly sup­port­ive of them. 

And before he knew it, King Hus­sein found him­self under attack from Russ­ian-pro­vid­ed Syr­i­an tanks that were on their way to Jor­dan, fund­ed and sup­port­ed by Egypt, to help their Pales­tin­ian broth­ers with their fight against the Jor­da­ni­ans. Arab against Arab. 

So the King turned to the only mil­i­tary force capa­ble of com­ing to his aid. But the Amer­i­cans insist­ed that they could have noth­ing to do with what was going on. It would have to be the Israelis. So the King of Jor­dan was final­ly res­cued by the arrival of Israeli jets, that sent the Syr­i­an tanks scur­ry­ing back to whence they’d set off from. 

King Hus­sein of Jor­dan, by the way, exudes effort­less grace and charm, and is the most mar­vel­lous adver­tise­ment for breed­ing and the kind of edu­ca­tion that only obscene wealth can pro­vide you with. And the con­trast he pro­vides to the sight of those sim­i­lar­ly schooled clowns who’ve been knock­ing the fur­ni­ture over in West­min­ster for the past decade or so is, to put it mild­ly, stark.

There are, inevitably, one or two gaps. I was sur­prised that there was no ref­er­ence to the way in which the price of oil was used by the Arab coun­tries in the wake of the Yom Kip­pur War in 1973. Notwith­stand­ing which, this is a land­mark tele­vi­sion series. 

But it’s impos­si­ble not to note that, for all the vio­lence, blood­shed and hatred that was then in the air, when the series end­ed in 1998, that was, we now know, a high point in Israeli-Arab relations. 

What­ev­er about the first 50 years, the next 25 would, unimag­in­ably, see a sig­nif­i­cant deterioration.

Very unusu­al­ly, you can see all 6 episodes on YouTube:

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Filed Under: Television Tagged With: ,

Shadow of Truth, another TV gem from Israel

September 1, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Shad­ow of Truth

It’s hard to avoid describ­ing the doc­u­men­tary series Shad­ow of Truth as Israel’s Mak­ing a Mur­der­er (reviewed ear­li­er by me here). Released at round about the same time, in 2016, it was sub­se­quent­ly picked up by Net­flix and became one of their most watched true crime series, before being picked up and aired recent­ly on BBC4.

And, if you’re hap­py to accept my enthu­si­as­tic rec­om­men­da­tion as suf­fi­cient, I sug­gest you stop read­ing now, go away and watch all five episodes, before com­ing back to read the rest of this albeit con­scious­ly brief review. 

Notwith­stand­ing which, I don’t think it’s giv­ing too much away to assume that any­one who sits down to watch a five episode docu series on a famous and infa­mous mur­der tri­al will do so expect­ing at some point to be pre­sent­ed with some class of a twist.

So, and with­out giv­ing any­thing away, here very broad­ly is how it begins. A teenage girl is bru­tal­ly mur­dered in a leafy, bub­bled sub­urb in the Israeli hin­ter­land. And the first episode presents us with a clear and appar­ent­ly un-con­testable expla­na­tion as to exact­ly what hap­pened. Up until that is the final 20 sec­onds, when some­how, we appear to have the rug pulled from under us.

And in episode two, every­thing we thought we knew about what had hap­pened is, remark­ably, turned com­plete­ly upside down.

Cre­at­ed and direct­ed by Yotam Guen­del­man and Ari Pines it stirred up quite the storm when it was orig­i­nal­ly screened in Israel. Con­stant­ly sur­pris­ing, painstak­ing­ly researched and utter­ly com­pelling, it’s a loud and ring­ing endorse­ment for a free and inde­pen­dent media landscape. 

Which is as fun­da­men­tal for a func­tion­ing democ­ra­cy as main­tain­ing a clear sep­a­ra­tion between the judi­cia­ry and the vest­ed inter­ests of polit­i­cal parties.

Watch the trail­er for Shad­ow of Truth here:

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Filed Under: Television Tagged With: ,

Shoah: the Most Important Documentary of the 20th Century

May 5, 2023 by 1 Comment

I spent an entire day ensconced in the IFI cin­e­ma in Dublin in the 1990s to watch all 7 ½ hours of Syberberg’s extra­or­di­nary epic “Hitler, a Film from Ger­many”, from 1977. Susan Son­tag had famous­ly said of it that it was “one of the 20th century’s great­est works of art.”

Which had struck me at the time as sound­ing unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly wool­ly. But once you watch it you appre­ci­ate her choice of words. It’s not a film, or a doc­u­men­tary, a dra­mat­ic re-enact­ment, essay, opera, mime or the­atri­cal pro­duc­tion, and yet it draws on all those forms as a means of approach­ing its ungod­ly subject. 

But it’s only now that I’ve final­ly sum­moned up the courage to sit down and watch all 9 ½ hours of Claude Lanzmann’s mon­u­men­tal “Shoah”, from 1985, doc­u­ment­ing the holocaust. 

It is, as it needs to be, con­stant­ly har­row­ing and as such is a much-need­ed anti­dote to some­thing like Schindler’s List. 

Filmed over 11 years, Lanz­mann makes some remark­able choic­es. There’s no use of archive footage. Instead, he inter­views absolute­ly every­one he can find and talks to them, calm­ly, in a per­func­to­ry way, about what they can remember. 

And one of the first things that strikes you is how young every­one is. This is the mid 1970s, bare­ly 30 years after the IIWW, so many of the peo­ple he inter­views are in their 40s, 50s and 60s. 

He talks to some of the very few sur­vivors of the holo­caust, most of whom speak to him from their homes in Israel. To some of the casu­al wit­ness­es who’d been liv­ing and work­ing there in Poland, as the camps in Tre­blin­ka and Auschwitz came into being. And to a num­ber of SS offi­cers, whom he secret­ly films and records. 

And because he under­stands how fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant it is to doc­u­ment all of this, and to not allow his emo­tions inter­fere in that process. And because he’s pre­pared to spend 11 years doing it, and will only release the result in its entire 9 ½ hour form, the result is a film that’s qui­et­ly mes­meris­ing. And cumu­la­tive­ly dis­turb­ing in its insis­tence of unhur­ried­ly por­ing over all the details, one by one. 

And the phrase that, inevitably, keeps return­ing is Han­nah Arendt’s famous “the banal­i­ty of evil”.

But one of the things that has changed over the past cou­ple of decades is our view­ing habits. Few of us would ever have actu­al­ly got around to spend an entire week­end in the cin­e­ma watch­ing all 9 ½ hours of a doc­u­men­tary on the holo­caust, how­ev­er much we might have intend­ed to.

But watch­ing a less than 10 hour doc­u­men­tary on one of the most impor­tant events in mod­ern his­to­ry is far less improb­a­ble today, giv­en our cur­rent appetite for binge-watch­ing all sorts of unde­serv­ing dross, which we’re more than hap­py to waste hours and hours doing.

Every­body should put aside 10 hours to watch Shoah. It’s appalling. And mes­mer­iz­ing. And is one of, if not the most impor­tant doc­u­ments of the 20th century. 

Watch the trail­er for Shoah here.

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Filed Under: Film, Television Tagged With: ,
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