On Romper

Becca Bleznak – Dec 12, 2018

A second season of the well-regarded series My Brilliant Friend has been ordered. The show, which airs on HBO in the U.S., was originally billed as an eight-episode miniseries based on the novel of the same name. However, as soon as word broke that the bestselling book was being made into a TV series, there was speculation that it could be expanded. Now that it’s official, when is Season 2 of My Brilliant Friend set to premiere?

The first season aired on HBO for consecutive days (Sunday and Monday) starting Nov. 18, with the final episode on Dec. 10. On Dec. 4, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Season 2 had been green lit, quoting the network’s president of programming, Casey Bloys, who said, “We’re thrilled that Elena Ferrante’s epic story has resonated so powerfully with viewers and critics, and we look forward to the continuing journey of Elena and Lila.”

As you’ll recall, Season 1 depicts the ever-changing friendship of two girls in a small town outside Naples, Italy, beginning with their first adventure as primary age children. Over the course of My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila compete when it comes to education, boys, and pretty much anything else that comes between them. But their bond is strong, though it’s tested in the first season finale.

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On The Paris Review

Rhian Sasseen – Dec 7, 2018 

I tend to be suspicious of film and television adaptations of my favorite books. This might stem from a kind of jealousy—the slow unraveling of a narrative or the exact right word used for the exact right idea are part of the pleasures of literature, but sometimes, as a writer, I wish I could borrow from film the immediacy of a jump cut or image. So it was with some apprehension that I began to watch My Brilliant Friend, HBO’s new adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Would this first season—eight episodes in total, dedicated entirely to portraying the first novel in the series—water down the source material, with its unflinching portrayal of the violence and poverty of postwar Naples and the simultaneous terror and joy of girlhood and female friendship? After devouring the first few episodes this past weekend, I can assure you that, so far, it does not. Rather, this is the rare adaptation that both hews closely to its source material and yet manages to escape any stiltedness. And while Ferrante’s novels remain first in my heart, there are moments in the television series—the visual shock of a red menstrual stain amid the otherwise muted color palette—that might work even better on film.

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On Page Six

Dec 8, 2018

Maggie Gyllenhaal who stars in the hot Netflix film “The Kindergarten Teacher,” is working on her directing debut.

“I’m adapting an Elena Ferrante novel called ‘The Lost Daughter,’ ” she said during a “Kindergarten Teacher” Q&A at the Hotel Plaza Athenée.

“I actually just finished the second draft of the adaptation. I’m still working on it, but I’m just now starting to think about the elements of directing it.”

She admitted: “I feel actually sometimes terrified about the idea of directing. But I also think I have to.”

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On Vulture

Hillary Kelly – Dec 3, 2018

Finally, the sun! For five long episodes Elena’s skin appeared naturally pallid — like a life spent in a dusty Neapolitan apartment complex, head stuck in a book, was only coincidental to her face’s grayish tinge and the slashes of red under her eyes. But, if you’ll pardon about a dozen fashion-magazine cliches, Elena’s new tan gives her a fresh-faced glow. Her eyes suddenly pop. Her pimple-bedeviled skin clears right up. She’s really nailing that whole no-makeup makeup look.

The charm of Ischia is evident from the first moments we see it. It’s a place that was designed to take up residence on bucket lists. Towering stone houses are built right into the cliffs. Water laps right up against the streets leading to the port. Seemingly every window offers a view of the azure Mediterranean, and if there’s ever crappy weather, well, it’s taken its own vacation. There are already Elena Ferrante tours that circle through the island; after the TV series, they should expect a boom.

But the biggest change to Elena during her summer with the sweet, charming Nella — a woman who embodies so many of my own Italian nonna’s characteristics that I wanted to reach through the screen and wrap my arms around her bright, florid smock of a housedress — isn’t simply brought on by the sun. The sun surely shines just as frequently on Naples, which is just a short ferry-ride away from Ischia. It’s the independence, the remove from the grubby halls of her apartment building and the vicious neighborhood feuds, the distance from her mother’s looming presence and, especially, Lila’s towering brilliance and magnetism. It’s apparent from the first moments (can you imagine most 14-year-olds today being permitted to leave their hometown for the first time ever, alone, and make their way to a stranger’s house?) as she climbs the hill to Nella’s pensione, suitcase in hand, that Ischia will work as a tonic on Elena’s young but harried nerves.

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On The AV Club

Allison Shoemaker – Dec 5, 2018

Lenú sits alone on the beach, in the dark. The air is warm, the breeze off the ocean cool and sweet. The sand has cooled down, slightly damp to the touch; she burrows her heels and wiggles her fingers, and the grains make room. The waves crash, soft but relentless, a welcome hum that ensures, just as the darkness does, that she feels properly alone, unobserved, unheard. She’s free to cry as though no one will ever know, and in fact, no one will. The breeze whips her hair and the hem of her skirt, and she cries, and the cry is a relief, a blessing. Her 15-year-old heart is a powerful muscle, and it aches beautifully. It stirs up a longing, terrible and marvelous.

The sand was cold, gray-black in the moonlight, the sea scarcely breathed. There was not a living soul and I began to weep with loneliness…. What signs did I carry, what fate? I thought of the neighborhood as a whirlpool from which any attempt at escape was an illusion. Then I heard the rustle of sand, I turned, I saw the shadow of Nino.

In a better world, this review would center on how acutely Saverio Costanzo, Elena Ferrante, and Margherita Mazzucco communicate the almost unbearable teenaged pang of loving someone who doesn’t love you back. It would praise that scene, and see all else through the lens of gorgeous, dreadful young love. That it cannot do so is not a failing on the part of My Brilliant Friend. It’s a failing of the way things are. That scene, with Lenú on the beach, rings so true that it makes hearts much older than 15 wring with just a touch of that same kind of longing. But that’s only one scene. There are others, and they’re every bit as honest as that cry on the beach.

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On Bustle

Rebecca Patton – Dec 4, 2018

Spoilers ahead for My Brilliant Friend Episodes 5 and 6. Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila (Gaia Girace) are growing up, and with that comes attention from men. And while it’s been obvious from the beginning that women don’t have much agency in the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels, the sexual assault in My Brilliant Friend Episodes 6 is still difficult to stomach. The show’s realistic depiction of 1950s Naples — especially when it comes to what women can and cannot do — is impressively executed.

However, in these most recent episodes, My Brilliant Friend‘s heavy subject matterbecomes weightier still — subject matter like sexual assault, violence against women, and men’s inability to take no for an answer. With such heavy themes, it’s puzzling how anyone is watching the episodes back to back the way HBO is releasing them, rather than allow audiences to chew on each installment for longer.

Up until this point in the series, Lila and Elena have both been confined to their neighborhood; however, the Greco girl finally gets to see the world outside of their dusty, suffocating walls in Episode 6. Her former teacher, Maestra Oliviero, gives her the opportunity to stay with her cousin in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. There, Lenu passes a blissful summer on the beach, swimming, reading books, and writing unreturned letters to Lila. To make things even more exciting, Elena’s old crush, Nino Sarratore (Francesco Serpico), shows up with his family, and they begin spending time together. It soon becomes clear that Nino hates his father, Donato Sarratore, although he’s both charismatic and kind.

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On Paste Magazine

 Matt Brennan – Dec 5, 2018

In the eyes of a child, still learning to see—or the memories of a grown woman, still fighting to see differently—the tenement’s warring factions are as important as the mafioso at the funeral Mass, or the shooting of fireworks on a Neapolitan rooftop. So it is in My Brilliant Friend’s most striking sequence, set in an apartment block’s dusty courtyard. As our narrator, Lenù (Margherita Mazzucco), and her co-conspirator/co-protagonist, Lila (Ludovica Nasti), look on, Lidia Sarratore and her husband’s mad mistress, Melina Cappuccio, perform their private drama for the groundlings below. The neighbors gossip and snipe from balconies strung with fresh laundry, and between cuts, the camera turns, following their voices; occasionally, the image returns to the girls on the street clutching their dolls, heads swiveling to hear the chorus. By the time the dispute erupts in a brutal staircase fight, its chaos of pleas, insults, and awful blows finally causing Lenù to faint, director Saverio Costanzo has constructed a sequence worthy of Rear Window: Elena Greco is our L.B. Jefferies, her eyes our telephoto lens.

Unsurprisingly, the response to HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s sublime novel, the first of four in her “Neapolitan cycle,” has been rather muted. After all, the lives of two girls in midcentury Naples, poor strivers hoping to escape the fates of Lidia, Melina, their maestra, their mothers, are not the raw materials of the Internet’s next obsession. Even critics’ largely positive reception of the series reads as restrained, often reluctant, whether born of ardor for Ferrante’s writing or an exceedingly narrow definition of “enthralling” direction: In the most telling of the “favorable” reviews I consulted, a Russian nesting doll of barbed criticism and faint praise, The New Yorker’s Troy Patterson describes the “humble tenderness” “beneath the show’s heavy coats of operatic varnish and prestige-TV enamel,” like an archeologist dusting off bones at Pompeii.

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On Variety

Joe Otterson – Dec 4, 2018

HBO and Italian broadcaster RAI have renewed “My Brilliant Friend” for a second season ahead of the Season 1 finale.

The eight-episode first season of the show is based on Elena Ferrante’s best-selling book of the same name, which is the first of her four-part series published in the U.S. by Europa Editions. Season 2 will be based on “The Story of a New Name,” her second book in the series.

“We’re thrilled that Elena Ferrante’s epic story has resonated so powerfully with viewers and critics, and we look forward to the continuing journey of Elena and Lila,” said Casey Bloys, president of HBO Programming.

The series is the tale of Elena Greco and the most important friend in her life. She met Raffaella Cerullo, whom she has always called Lila, in the first year of primary school in 1950. Set in Naples, their story goes on to cover more than 60 years of their lives and explores the mystery of Lila, Elena’s brilliant friend and – in a way – both her best friend and her worst enemy.

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