On The Cut on Tuesdays

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

Share Ferrante Forever: We Revisit My Brilliant Friend

Nov 13, 2018

With host Molly Fischer, from New York Magazine and Gimlet Media.

Ferrante Fever was an epidemic circa 2014-2016, and the new HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend is the perfect excuse to revisit everything we loved about the Neapolitan novels. The four books span decades in the lives of two Italian women: From their childhood in 1950s Naples, to their involvement in the political radicalism of the ’60s and ’70s, up until 2010 … which is when one of the women, who has become a successful writer, learns that the other — who still lives in the neighborhood where they grew up — has disappeared. The crux of the story is the way these two women have been inside each other’s heads for their entire conscious lives. Calling it a “friendship” almost feels simplistic.

This week’s show explores the world of Elena Ferrante: We talked to Ann Goldstein, the translator who’s become a stand-in for the pseudonymous author; Danielle Oteri, who leads tours of Lila and Lenu’s Naples; and Dayna Tortorici, whose essay “Those Like Us” is essential for anyone interested in learning more about Ferrante’s ideas. Plus, you’ll hear from writers, editors, and fellow Ferrante fans like Samhita Chakraborty, Aminatou Sow, and Ruth Spencer.

New York Post: How Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neopolitan Novels’ made it to HBO

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

On New York Post

Lauren Sarner – Nov 12, 2018

Nobody knows who wrote the wildly popular “Neapolitan Novels” — not even the creators of HBO’s Italian-language adaptation of the literary phenomenon.

The international bestselling four-book series has sold more than 10 million copies in 40 countries, but its author is unknown — using the pseudonym Elena Ferrante.

“Her identity is as guarded from us as it is to the rest of the world,” says Jennifer Schuur, the only American executive producer on “My Brilliant Friend,” airing Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.

“[Director and writer] Saverio [Costanzo] will email [Ferrante] through her publisher, and then her publisher will pass it along and she will email back,” says Schuur. “They communicate that way.”

subtitles.

In the eight-episode first season, which is based on the first book, “My Brilliant Friend,” Elena and Lila are played by newcomers Elisa del Genio and Ludovica Nasti as children, and Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace as teens.

Schuur (who’s also worked on “Hannibal” and “Big Love”) says the casting process was no walk in the park. More than 8,000 children auditioned.

“In the books, it lives and dies by the girls and watching that relationship over the course of 60 years,” she says. “You’re going to have four sets of actresses playing the characters over time, so that … is a challenge. Then, on top of that, you have to find actresses who speak in the Neapolitan dialect, because that was the only way to bring this to life in an authentic way. So you can’t even just cast from all of Italy. You have to go to this one small place in the South.”

Now Toronto: TV review: HBO’s My Brilliant Friend is phenomenal

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

Italian-language series based on Elena Ferrante’s popular Neapolitan novels is faithful, magical and unsentimental

On Now Toronto

Glenn Sumi – Nov 14, 2018

The millions of fans who gobbled up Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet can breathe easy.

My Brilliant Friend is a faithful and deliciously atmospheric adaptation of the first volume in the series. Eight hour-long episodes (six of which were available to review) is the perfect length for this rich material, and the cast and production design will make you swear you’re watching a genuine slice of post-war Italian life.

When elderly narrator Elena, a writer, learns of her childhood bestie Lila’s disappearance, she decides to recount the story of their scrappy upbringing in a lower-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples in the 1950s.

Both girls are bright and poor, but a stroke of luck allows Elena to continue through middle and high school, while Lila must work in her family shoe store, secretly studying on the side. The onset of adolescence changes their status in the neighbourhood, especially for Lila, who’s wooed by many young men, including a charismatic gangster.

If the miniseries suffers from any problem, it’s the same one that affected the book: it’s hard to keep track of all the characters and their families. (And unlike the book, there’s no index to keep consulting.)

The non-Italian viewer also won’t know when the characters are speaking in proper Italian or in dialect.

But director Saverio Costanzo’s attention to detail is phenomenal. He handles the novel’s most memorable scenes – everything from a trip to a musty cellar to find lost dolls to a brutal street fight in downtown Naples – with an innate sense of mood and drama. And the scene in which neighbours crowd into a room to watch their first-ever TV set is rendered with real magic.

The way he captures poverty is clear-eyed and never sentimental.

Refinery 29: 13 Things About The My Brilliant Friend TV Adaptation All Elena Ferrante Fans Need To Know

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

On Refinery 29

Elena Nicolaou – Nov 14, 2018

The HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s book My Brilliant Friend is arriving on Sunday, November 18, and all we can wistfully sigh is, “At last.” After countless articles fantasizing about the adaptations’ dream cast, we’ll see the official visualization of the books that set off a little something called “Ferrante fever.” Ferrante’s quartet about two women growing up in post-war Naples ignited a rare kind of literary craze.

The series’ foray into prestige TVseemed almost inevitable — but with a series this beloved, the stakes were high. Luckily, we can say the adaptation clings to the source material accurately, thanks in part to the interventions of the enigmatic author, who goes by a pen name. When you see Elena Greco and Lina Cerullo on screen, you’ll recognize them immediately by their faces, as well as by the mountain of emotion that exists just a level below their expressions, occasionally peaking through.

My Brilliant Friend catches Elena and Lina at the start of their winding lives. They’re bright young girls who recognize in one another an aching hunger to be more than what their traditional, rigid community in Naples has dreamt for them. The next three novels follow the repercussions of their ambition — and, most memorably, tracks their thorny, compelling, occasionally toxic friendship.

This is what we know you want to know about the adaptation of My Brilliant Friend.

For the uninitiated, this is what the Neapolitan Novels are about.

Elena Ferrante’s four-book series begin when Elena Greco, a woman in her 60s, receives a call that her old friend, Lina Cerullo, has suddenly disappeared. Elena doesn’t seem terribly surprised. This revelation prompts Elena to write the long story of their friendship, beginning with the events depicted in My Brilliant Friend. In that first novel, Lina and Elena meet as elementary schoolers in a post-World War II Naples community set on dimming their fire and eventually marrying them off. The next books — The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child — track the rest of their lives. The elderly Elena tries to parse her younger self’s motivations and dreams, and does the same for Lina.

Elena Ferrante hand-picked the series’ director.

Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels are beloved for their crisp depiction of women’s inner lives. However, the HBO adaptation was directed by a man — a man who came with the Ferrante stamp of approval. Saverio Costanzo is a Roman director most famous for his 2014 movie Hungry Hearts, which starred Adam Driver.

Costanzo’s relationship with Ferrante goes back to 2007, back when he was a young director looking to adapt her novella The Lost Daughter. Despite being dissatisfied with the past two adaptations of her novellas, Ferrante agreed that Costanzo could have rights to The Lost Daughter for six months. But Costanzo couldn’t make the script work. After six months of laboring, he renounced the rights. Ferrante was out of touch for the next nine years, while Costanzo’s career grew.

Then, in 2016, Costanzo got an unexpected call saying Ferrante had put his name forward to direct the TV adaptation of her Neapolitan Novels. A few weeks later, producers called to say he got the job, one to which he had never applied. Though Costanzo spoke of his initial hesitations to the New York Times, he decided he couldn’t pass up a second chance to adapt Ferrante’s work.

The Sidney Morning Herald: ‘Why me?’ asks the man ordained to direct Elena Ferrante’s celebrated novels

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

On The Sidney Morning Herald

Stephanie Bunbury – Nov 13, 2018

Like the rest of us, Saverio Costanzo has never knowingly met Elena Ferrante, whose Neapolitan novels about a fictional Elena and her difficult, frightening, ferociously intelligent friend Lila were so successful when published in English that one of the great coinages of 2012 was “Ferrante fever”. Nevertheless, it was Ferrante who chose Costanzo to direct an eight-part adaptation of the first Neapolitan novel, My Brilliant Friend. At arm’s length, the-writer-who-is-Elena-Ferrante told Costanzo he had the job and HBO, which had commissioned the series with Italy’s RAI, that she would accept no one else.

“I try to answer the question ‘why me?’ but I cannot answer that question because I am not Elena Ferrante. I didn’t ask. I am afraid to go too close,” Costanzo says. He had directed four features, including Hungry Hearts with Adam Driver, along with the Italian version of In Treatment; he also had a history with Ferrante. In 2007, she gave him permission through her publishers to adapt her third novel, The Lost Child. He tried, but “couldn’t find the fil rouge”, as he puts it. So that was that. “And then, nine years later, she proposed me to do My Brilliant Friend.” He obeyed the call immediately. “I believe we share a kind of way of imagining.”

Elena and Lila meet as small children, playing in the courtyard of their decrepit block of flats in Naples. The year is 1950; the neighbourhood, run by a former black marketeer, smells of poverty and violence. Firebrand Lila and the more diffident, bookish Lenu decide together that they want to be writers, but their uneducated parents expect them to leave school at 12, work hard and marry local boys. And they do find boyfriends – in this, as in everything else, the two growing girls both collaborate and compete – but no relationship is as passionate or complex as the triad between Lila, Elena and books.

Unsurprisingly, given that Ferrante’s works had been lionised by a largely female readership, there was some consternation when it was announced that the series would be directed by a man. “As a man, it’s impossible for Costanzo to identify with Lila and Lenu’s struggles. Their story is distinctly female,” wrote Julie Kosin in Harper’s Bazaar. Even Jennifer Schuur, the executive producer of the series at HBO, admitted she was “curious” about Ferrante’s choice. “On the surface, you would not think that a male could necessarily understand, in a cellular way, the nuances of what Ferrante’s writing about in those books,” she said before filming began. At the same time, she knew he wanted “to be very careful with the gift he had been given”.

Continue reading →

Literary Hub: MY BRILLIANT FRIEND IS THE KIND OF TV WE NEED RIGHT NOW: SLOW

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

THE HBO ADAPTATION OF ELENA FERRANTE IS A REFRESHING CHANGE

On Literary Hub

Emily Temple – Nov 12, 2018

The most anticipated literary television event of the season—and maybe the year—has to be HBO’s eight-episode mini series adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first book in her Neapolitan series, and the original germ that gave you and everyone you know a bad case of “Ferrante fever” a few years back.

But apparently, when the first two episodes premiered at the Venice Film Festival, all that eager anticipation quickly turned to “general sighing” and widespread boredom. “To say the advance press screening was a muted affair would be generous,” Emily Yoshida wrote in Vulture. “I witnessed more walkouts throughout the two hours than I did during Luca Guadagnino’s bloody, polarizing Suspiria.” She wondered if the problem had something to do with the unpracticed young actors (Elisa Del Genio and Ludovica Nasti) but wrote that “[director Saverio] Costanzo’s direction is so ponderous and slow that I have to wonder how much of a difference it would make.”

I have now seen the first six episodes of My Brilliant Friend, and I can tell you: it is slow. But its slowness is part of what makes it great television. And for the record: I found all four actresses to be phenomenal, especially for being untrained, but also probably because of it. Gaia Girace, who plays teenage Lila, is particularly striking; it’s hard to look away from her when she’s on screen, which surely tracks with Ferrante’s vision.

The show, overall, is very loyal to its source material—it had to be, lest the fans revolt—and so let’s be real: the book is also slow. I don’t mean this as a criticism. My Brilliant Friend is slow, particularly at the beginning, because it is dealing with the minutiae of children’s lives. It has lots of characters whose names and ages and relationships to one another you keep forgetting. It is a thorough, detailed account of the consciousness of one girl living in relative poverty. Like Knausgaard’s My Struggle, with which Ferrante’s works are often paired as an example of “autofiction,” the slowness is part of the point. It’s what makes it feel like life.

Vanity fair: How Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend Came to Life on HBO

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

“Ferrante Fever” is coming to television, but can a male director successfully capture the author’s tale of female friendship?

On Vanity fair

Joy Press – Nov 9, 2018

one of her fans know who Elena Ferrante is or what she looks like, but her pseudonymous novels have inspired the kind of obsessive worship most writers can only dream of. Since the publication of her novel My Brilliant Friend, a kind of literary delirium has engulfed Ferrante in the U.S. and across the globe—particularly among women ravenous for her complex depiction of female friendship and creativity. This “Ferrante Fever” spawned midnight release parties for her Neapolitan Quartet novels, a mini-industry of Ferrante-centric tourism in Italy, theatrical versions of her work, and a documentary about the author’s success.

The cult of Ferrante should expand exponentially with HBO’s eight-part adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, which premieres November 18. Like the novel, the series winds itself around the friendship of Lenù and Lila. Tucked away in a crumbling, impoverished quarter of post–World War II Naples, the girls are expected to leave school before adolescence and take up wifely toil. Lila stands out from her drab surroundings—a “terrible, dazzling girl,” as Ferrante describes her, who is almost as ferocious as she is brilliant. A life of the mind is not on the menu of options for these girls, yet Lila’s rabid desire to be a writer inspires Lenù and binds them together in a lifelong friendship, even as their paths diverge.

When it was announced that the HBO series (co-produced with Italy’s Rai network) would be directed by a man—Saverio Costanzo, the Italian director of the 2014 movie Hungry Hearts and the Italian adaptation of the HBO series In Treatment—many fans were surprised. Why not ask a woman to dive into the tangled emotional web of female intimacy?

Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal: Elena Ferrante’s ‘My Brilliant Friend’ Comes to HBO

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

To adapt the novel for the screen, producers headed to southern Italy and enlisted Neapolitan-speaking actresses, an elaborate set and thousands of extras

On The Wall Street Journal

Ellen Gamerman – Nov 7, 2018

The new television adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend” attempts above all to re-create the story as readers imagined it.

The screen version of Elena Ferrante’s best-selling novel, the first in her four-book Neapolitan series, will air on HBO in eight one-hour episodes starting Nov. 18. The story follows the complicated friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, who meet at a Naples school in the 1950s.

Vulture: Finding the Ferrante Four

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

HBO’s My Brilliant Friend stars were chosen from 9,000 children to portray two of the most elusive characters in literature.

On Vulture

Phoebe Reilly – Nov 19, 2018

itting with the Italian stars of HBO’s My Brilliant Friend adaptation is like observing two sets of sisters. The Lilas — Ludovica Nasti, 12, and Gaia Girace, 15 — are raven-haired and intense. Ludovica frantically waves her arm every time she wants to speak, while teenage Gaia offers a haughty stare. The Elenas — Elisa Del Genio, 11, and Margherita Mazzucco, 16 — are timid by comparison. With their dirty-blonde hair and large green eyes, Elisa and Margherita appear shy and serious and somehow more accessible.

Up until now, lunch at an L.A. restaurant has proceeded calmly through interpreters, as the girls devour pasta and pizza that miraculously doesn’t offend their palate. But when the topic turns to the true identity of author Elena Ferrante, who famously writes under a nom de plume, the table erupts in a chorus of si, si, si and no, no, no as everybody — including the actresses’ mothers — starts speaking at once. The interpreter struggles to keep up. “They’re all saying they think they know who it is,” she explains. “It’s a writer that we met in L.A., but she’s Italian!” shouts Gaia. “There’s so many things that don’t jive, so we think it must be her.” She reaches across the table to high-five Elisa, who grins in agreement. Ludovica and Margherita shake their heads. They prefer the prevailing rumor, introduced by a New York Review of Books blog two years ago, that Ferrante is a Rome-based translator, or possibly a college professor. Continue reading →

The Guardian: My Brilliant Friend review – a beautiful adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s tale

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

This authentic take on the first Neapolitan novel is the most honest and vivid portrait of the lives of young girls ever brought to TV

On The Guardian

Rebecca Nicholson – Nov 19, 2018

Adapting much-loved books for the screen is risky and can be fraught, especially if a series has been as adored as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. The characters live so vividly in readers’ minds that their TV forms may only be able to exist on a sliding scale of disappointment.

Thankfully, Saverio Costanza’s take on the first instalment, 2012’s My Brilliant Friend (Sky Atlantic), comes with an understated, solid confidence that suits its source material perfectly. Ferrante, whoever she may be, is credited as one of four writers on the show, so it is little wonder that it feels authentic, but this is a gorgeous TV show on its own merits.

It is unlikely that anyone who read the novels would expect a boisterous affair, but, even so, the first episode (of eight) unravels at a notably unhurried pace. This languid approach may be a turn-off for some, but it has a steady-handed charm. By the end of the first hour, we know Lenù and Lila as if we are close friends. Perhaps more perilous than trampling over beloved stories is relying on child actors to carry them, as is necessary in episode one, but Elisa del Genio, as Lenù, and Ludovica Nasti, as Lila, are remarkable. As fights and disagreements rise and fall around the girls, Costanza’s direction lingers on their expressive faces; the arduous casting process, which reportedly took months, was clearly worth it.

For those who have not read Ferrante’s novels – nobody should have trouble getting into the TV series, regardless of whether they have or not – the story begins when Elena (Lenù), at this point in her 60s, receives a phone call from the son of her childhood friend Lila. Lila is missing; she has taken her clothes with her and has cut up family photographs. Elena’s response is muted and eventually cold, teasing of a long and complicated past. “Learn to live on your own,” she advises him, suggesting she is unlikely to win an award for compassion any time soon: “And don’t call me again, either.”

The Independent’s: My Brilliant Friend, episode 1, review: ‘The Dolls’ gives Elena Ferrante’s novels a faithful, cinematic treatment

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

HBO delivers a soaring adaptation of the Neapolitan literary phenomenon, in one of the biggest TV events of the year

On The Independent’s

Ben Kelly – Nov 20, 2018

Few books have captured the zeitgeist with such imagination as Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

The four novel saga is an exploration of the lives of everyday people living through turbulent decades of Italian history, following the lives of Elena and Lila, whose friendship spans from the postwar period to the present day, set against the scenic backdrop of Naples. Ferrante explores the complexities of female relationships, and the struggles of the working class. Her scope is sweeping, and her pages overflow with so many characters that at the start of each book she provides a dramatis personae.

The new HBO adaptation, airing on Sky Atlantic on the UK, has done justice to her magnum opus, with a faithful, cinematic treatment of the boisterous society she portrays. It is a fitting tribute to Ferrante, who in the past decade has grown from little known, word-of-mouth Italian novelist, to international literary phenomenon.

This is partly down to her writing. But intrigue has also built around her anonymity. Ferrante’s aversion to publicity and any public appearances means her very identity is almost entirely unknown.Now, fans and newcomers alike have been graced with this adaptation, diligently directed by Saverio Costanzo. The opening scene shows a modern day, aged Elena learning that Lila has gone missing, and so she begins to write the story of their friendship from the beginning.

The Telegraph: My Brilliant Friend, episode one, review: a powerful and nuanced story of a bygone era

Posted on November 22, 2018 by admin2

On The Telegraph

Jasper Rees – Nov 19, 2018

Those anxious that Ferrante’s first-person prose would go for a burton are treated to lashings of textured voice-over. Often a voice-over is a confession of storytelling failure. Not here.”

And

“Atmospherically it felt like an authentic descendant of the films of Italy’s postwar neo-realism, a nuanced mulch of stoical poverty and extravagant emotionalism.”

Also very complimentary to the child actors:

“ the two young leads…have established a remarkably high standard. Their burgeoning mutual fascination is already making for an intense two-hander about a friendship fired in the kiln of childhood. As for the wider society that frames them, normally these teeming Bruegelesque canvases require you to make the acquaintance of too many characters at once, but there’s already a sharp sense of who’s who. Perhaps it helps that this is a community without secrets, where every convulsion is witnessed by all.

Daily mail: Best books on female friendships: Author Patricia Nicol suggests novels featuring enduring relationships

Posted on November 21, 2018 by admin2

On Daily Mail

Patricia Nicol, Nov 19,2018

My first proper friendship was a fiercely intense one. This little girl and I would spend hours playing placidly together. Then something would flip and we’d start scrapping like Burton and Taylor at 2am.

Insults would fly, bloodcurdling cries would reverberate around the house, grown-ups would rush from other rooms to pull us apart.

When they did, we would be red-cheeked, tear-stained and each clutching clumps of the other’s hair.

We grew out of it, of course, and it shocks me to recall those events now. However, I am not sure if I have ever grown out of intense female friendships, nor if I would want to.

My Brilliant Friend, the first instalment of Elena Ferrante’s compelling quartet, is being televised on Sky Atlantic from this evening. Like readers across the globe, I read this novel compulsively, reeled in by its portrayal of the intense, jealous friendship between Lila and Elena, two clever girls growing up in a violent part of Fifties Naples.

Grown-up Elena tells the story, but it’s Lila, ‘that terrible, dazzling girl’, who exists at its heart.

Express: My Brilliant Friend on HBO location: Where is My Brilliant Friend filmed?

Posted on November 21, 2018 by admin2

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND starts tonight on Sky Atlantic and has already started airing on HBO but where is the drama series filmed? Here’s everything you need to know.

On Express

Molli Mitchell, Nov 19, 2018

My Brilliant Friend comes from American network HBO. It is an adaption of Elena’s Ferrante’s bestselling novel of the same name. It is the first of four novels in the Neapolitan Novels series that are being adapted for TV. The drama series aired last night (Sunday, November 18) on HBO and premieres tonight on Sky Atlantic at 9pm.

There are eight episodes in the series and each instalment is 50 minutes long.

Episodes will air every Sunday and Monday in America on HBO at 9pm and every Monday and Tuesday in the UK on Sky Atlantic at 9pm.Viewers can also watch My Brilliant Friend on NOW TV. You can subscribe to the streaming service for £7.99 after a two-week free trial.

My Brilliant friend is a Neapolitan-language miniseries. Here’s everything you need to know about where it was set and filmed.

Financial Times: My brilliant friend on TV

Posted on November 21, 2018 by admin2

On Financial Times

“It’s hard to imagine fans of the books feeling short-changed; Saverio Costanzo’s production looks and feels wonderfully authentic, from the girls’ handmade frocks and the dowdy 1950s settings to the vibrant Neapolitan dialect interspersed with more formal Italian. At the head of a troupe of exquisitely natural young performers, the two girls in the central roles are vastly impressive. Elena, known as Lenù (Elisa Del Genio), is taller, blonde, reserved but with an inner core of rebellion, while the fiery and self-possessed Lila (Ludovica Nasti) is like a tiny version of Sophia Loren.”

And “A huge part of the books’ appeal is the way they chart the changing role of women over the decades. This broader story of Italian life and culture is woven skilfully into a more intimate and complex consideration of the effects of a life-long tie to someone who is both sweetest friend and harshest rival.”