Nov 19, 2018
Yvonne Nolan preview the Sky Atlantic tv series “My Brilliant Friend”, based on the Elena Ferrante novels.
Tv Series
Articles and reviews about the TV adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels.
The Times: TV pick of the week: My Brilliant Friend
Victoria Segal – Nov 18, 2018
An Italian-language adaptation of the first book in Elena Ferrante’s much-adored series of Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend focuses on the poverty-stricken and violence-blighted childhoods of Elena (Elisa Del Genio, pictured on left) and Lila (Ludovica Nasti, on right). The two brightest girls in their school, they form an alliance in the chaotic and often frightening world of 1950s Naples. The director, Saverio Costanzo, has captured all the violence and vibrancy of the girls’ neighbourhood, a place of overcrowded schools, squalling babies and packed funerals, where neighbours shout intimate conversations between balconies, women hurl pots and irons from windows in terrible outbursts of rage, and a man who has crossed a loan shark might suddenly fly through the air and slam into a wall. Under the endless bright sunlight, My Brilliant Friend feels very dark, full of ominous foreshadowing, yet the two expressive young leads shine through as they subtly weigh up a turbulent universe and their place in it.
Read more
Culture Whisper: My Brilliant Friend episode 1 review
The miniseries adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s book My Brilliant Friend has finally started on Sky Atlantic. Two girls become lifelong friends amidst the aggressive environment of ’50s Naples
Euan Franklin – Nov 19, 2018
There’s a scene in the middle of this first episode of My Brilliant Friend, based on the novel by the famous recluse Elena Ferrante, when a bunch of kids throw stones at each other on a dirt track with many cars and tractors speeding passed and through them. Any misplaced movement could mean serious injury or death.
It’s similar to a scene in Vittoria De Sica’s classic neo-realist film Bicycle Thieves, in which a son follows his father across a road and nearly gets run over by traffic (the father doesn’t even notice).
My Brilliant Friend presents many such instances, demonstrating the danger, carelessness and violence of this particular world, especially for children – bringing Italian Neo-Realism (1944-1952) to the modern day. And although this HBO series is more lavish and refined than what these post-war Italian filmmakers would’ve preferred, it’s no less real and hard.
Elena, in old age, receives a call on her smartphone. Her lifelong friend has gone missing. This prompts her to open up a laptop in the dark, and type out her whole story. She takes us to Naples in the ’50s, when she was a little girl (Elisa del Genio). She’s smart, and top of her class. She becomes curious with a girl, Lila (Ludovica Nasti), who’s as intelligent but far more rebellious. They both endure the anger and horror spilling from their environment, growing a friendship among the turmoil.
Evening Standard: Monday’s best TV: My Brilliant Friend, Last Week Tonight and Blood
Susannah Butter – Nov 19, 2018
First of all, they’ve not ruined it.
Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend is known for its intricate descriptions and nuance, and is loved by everyone from Hillary Clinton to Alice Sebold.
So fans have set the bar high for this adaptation. If this first episode is anything to go by, they won’t be disappointed. It’s both faithful to the book and will open the story up to new audiences.
It begins, as the novel does, with Elena receiving a phone call from the son of childhood friend Raffaella Cerullo, who she calls Lila. Lila has disappeared, and not for the first time. It’s one dramatic gesture too far for Elena. Angry, she casts her mind back to her Fifties childhood, tracing how she and Lila became friends on a warm spring evening in Naples.
Ferrante was on board as a screenwriter (via email to preserve her secret identity). She struggled seeing her work stripped down to a screenplay but she was happy with the result. They even speak in the Neapolitan dialect of the Fifties so Italian viewers need subtitles too.
Before they utter a word you can immediately tell who is Elena and who is Lila — they have captured Elena’s curiosity and Lila’s irrepressible spirit and ambition. They wear covetable industrial-chic pinafores and knits in shades of grey and navy, with starched white collars.
More than 8,000 children and 500 adults auditioned for the show and the leads have no acting experience. Ludovica Nasti (Lila) had leukaemia when she was younger. Now 12, she is still unsure whether she wants to be a footballer or an actress when she grows up.
The Times: How Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend became a TV drama
As the international bestseller comes to Sky Atlantic, Tom Kington meets the cast on set in Italy
Nov 10, 2018
Working with one of the best-loved authors in the world on the TV adaptation of her intensely personal novels is not easy when you are banned from meeting her.
“It was like writing with a ghost,” says Saverio Costanzo, the director of the new, keenly awaited adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The novel is the first of Ferrante’s four “Neapolitan” novels, which have drawn global acclaim, fuelling the guessing game over the identity of the Italian author, who writes under a pen name and clings fiercely to her privacy.
At least Costanzo got to swap emails with Ferrante — via her publisher of course — but he claims that left him none the wiser about her identity.
“I started off thinking she was a he, then I decided she was a she, then a we,” he says. “Then I decided I didn’t care.”
The Italian director is sitting at the counter of a café on a €6 million set in Caserta in Campania, where 14 blocks of a postwar Naples neighbourhood, the backdrop for My Brilliant Friend, have been faithfully recreated.
His job is to bring to the small screen one of the finest studies in female friendship, as Elena, the narrator, looks back on growing up in the neighbourhood with Lila, the incredibly smart, inscrutable, moody and proud companion she adores, emulates and resents. Continue reading
RadioTimes: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is now a TV series – but is it any good?
Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is now a TV series – but is it any good?
Hannah Shaddock – Nov 19, 2018
“We lived in a world in which children and adults were often wounded, blood flowed from the wounds, they festered, and sometimes people died.”
That’s how Elena Greco, the narrator of My Brilliant Friend by Italian author Elena Ferrante, describes her childhood in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of 1950s Naples. It’s an apt description, too, of the world we see on screen in a new Sky Atlantic adaptation of the novel, beginning on Monday 19th November.Ferrante – who uses a pen name to maintain her anonymity, although there were attempts to unmask her in 2016 – was intimately involved in the production, developing the script with director Saverio Costanzo, entirely via email. The result is a mostly successful adaptation, closely aligned to Ferrante’s books, and a uniquely absorbing drama.
This first eight-episode run is based on the first book; three more series are planned, one for each of what are known as Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. My Brilliant Friend opens with a 60-something Elena Greco discovering that her old friend Lila is missing, having taken all of her belongings and cut herself out of family pictures. Elena, or Lenù, starts to write the story of their friendship to undermine Lila’s self-erasure, sending us back to the scruffy streets where the pair grew up.
The Guardian: ‘I fell in love with Lila’: on the set of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend
The reclusive author’s Neapolitan novels have been devoured by millions. Now the first one is about to hit TV screens in an ambitious adaptation made on location in Naples
Kathryn Bromwich – Nov 11, 2018
Earlier this year, a Brazilian tourist was wandering around Ischia, a picturesque volcanic island just off the coast of Naples in southern Italy. She was retracing the steps of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, the characters at the centre of the four-book series by Elena Ferrante that begins with My Brilliant Friend. Perhaps she was thinking of the scenes in the first novel, where Elena leaves home for a few blissful weeks of reading and swimming; perhaps of the more dramatic romantic entanglements that happen on the island in the second volume.
One evening, the tourist stopped at a local restaurant for dinner, and, to her surprise, found Elena Greco eating there, along with railroad worker and poet Donato Sarratore and his family. Or, at least, the actors playing these roles in the forthcoming television adaptation of the first novel. “It was very funny – she recognised every one of them,” says Saverio Costanzo, director of the series. “She told us that many, many people from South America are going around Naples to see places from Elena Ferrante.” In the past few years, thousands of tourists have visited the area because of the book series, a double bildungsroman about a pair of friends which spans the decades between their 50s childhood and the present day. A thriving industry has sprung up to meet demand: Ferrante tours ranging from half a day to six days take people around the book’s locations, promising an authentic Neapolitan experience.
But today the Naples that so ignited readers’ imaginations lies a little further afield. A 45-minute drive from the city, hidden down an unassuming but well guarded driveway, is a set of tall, dusky apartment blocks. In these streets, drying washing hangs from the balconies, and street vendors sell milk bottles, mismatched pots and pans, and ragged-looking clothes. The location is a former glass factory, disused since the 80s, which over the past year has been meticulously transformed into the “rione”, or neighbourhood, that provides the main setting for Ferrante’s four novels.
It is June 2018 when I visit the set of the much anticipated TV series, joint produced by the companies Wildside and Fandango. Filming is in progress; we are frequently silenced to avoid interrupting scenes. Extras with dour expressions and austere period costume eye us suspiciously as they chainsmoke, looking as if they have come to life from a black-and-white postwar film. Here are the familiar sights from the books: the tunnel under which the girls pass on an ill-fated trip to the sea, the grate where they throw their dolls, the Carracci grocery store. Inside the tobacconist’s, fresh prosciutto legs have been taken out of the fridge, and are displayed alongside 50s newspapers.
Harper’s Bazaar: My Brilliant Friend: Everything you need to know about the Elena Ferrante TV adaptation
The Neapolitan novels are coming to HBO
Ella Alexander – Nov 12, 2018
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels – a unique, transfixing portrayal of female friendship over the course of 50 years – have sold over two million copies since the release of the first book in 2011.
In an age where self-promotion is pervasive, Ferrante prefers to remain anonymous despite the media’s attempt to unmask her. But so compelling is her work that HBO decided to develop a TV version of her famous four novels, airing on Sky Atlantic, bringing the tale of Lila and Lenu to an even bigger audience.
What is it about?
The Neapolitan novels are both a story about the growth of two women from childhood to adulthood, as well as a history of 20th century Italy. It begins with two young girls, Lila and Lenu, who live in an impoverished part of post-war Naples. They are both extremely intelligent, but one is allowed to stay on after primary school and the other is forced to stop studying and work in the family business.
What follows is their journey as friends through to adulthood. My Brilliant Friendends as the protagonists enter early adulthood, while the following three books – The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child – chronicle their intense friendship at various points in their lives, spanning love, adultery, marriage, abuse, poverty, motherhood and loss. They are simultaneously each other’s best friends and worst enemies. There are few takes on female friendship that are as detailed, compelling or well-observed.
How many episodes will there be?
The series will form 32 episodes, divided into eight episodes for each book.
Harper’s Bazaar: What Elena Ferrante and the Neapolitan novels say about female friendship
As Sky Atlantic prepares to take Elena Ferrante’s best-selling My Brilliant Friend to the small screen, we look at why the story of Lila and Lenu has such potency
Ella Alexander – Nov 16, 2018
There is something about the Neapolitan novels that has gripped so many great swathes of people – and the reason that they are the subject of a new television adaptation airing this weekend on Sky Atlantic. They’re the kind of books to insatiably gorge on, to miss tube stops for, to stay up late reading regardless of early morning starts. And, when they’re done, when the reading is finished after book four, there is this is deep sense of wanting more.
It is the same feeling that first love evokes, and also of our some of our earliest female friendships, both of which carry the same levels of intensity. It is the latter of which Elena Ferrante captures so masterfully in the Neapolitan novels through the relationship between its star characters, Lila and Lenu – the depth and complexity of our most potent and formative female friendships.
We place a lot of emphasis on romantic love because of the narratives that we’re fed from such a young age. But the relationships and love we have for our female friends, especially during childhood, are equally as emotional and charged. Days at school with our earliest pals are followed up by hours on the phone because you still have so much to talk about. There are dance routines made up to pop songs that if you thought hard now you’d still remember the moves. You’d do anything for a sleepover over going home after dinner. You tidy each other’s rooms in the hope that your mum relents and lets you or them stay the night. And then there are hours spent giggling late in bed because you’ve found more to discuss.
When family holidays cause periods apart, because it’s pre-email, you write rambling and dramatic letters about the minutiae of your respective days. As you become teenagers, they inspire you and spur you on. You riff of one another and nourish each other. Sometimes, you pass off their opinion as your own. They suggest what to read, watch and what to listen to. For better or for worse, some of those things might stick even in adulthood. You are a team, who have not yet worked out mature, healthy boundaries and what it means to expect too much of each other. It is young romance without the physical.
The Guardian: From Fellini to Ferrante: the cinematic vision of My Brilliant Friend
The television adaptation Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is a reminder of Italy’s strong tradition in the coming-of-age genre, from Life Is Beautiful to Cinema Paradiso
On The Guardian
Tobias Jones – Nov 19, 2018
The first episode of My Brilliant Friend is likely to cause both great excitement and deep anxiety. Excitement because Ferrante is a writer with an almost evangelical following. Her quartet of “Neapolitan novels” have sold close to a million copies in the UK, and 1.8m in Italy. When readers finish one book, they tend to devour all four, mesmerised by the taut depiction of a poor suburb and its characters over the course of many decades. But that invented world of a few families living cheek-by-jowl in postwar Italy is both exotically foreign and yet – with its universal themes of poverty, violence, alliances and aspiration – astonishingly familiar. The anxiety arises because the adaptation might erase not only how we’ve imagined the characters, but also their world.
Elisabetta Salvini, a feminist historian at the University of Parma, says that Ferrante “knows how to use perfectly the history of our country, weaving it into the depth and complexity of her characters.” For Adalgisa Giorgio, herself Neapolitan and a senior lecturer in Italian studies at the University of Bath, the friendship depicted in the books “is full of conflict and confrontation, but it’s the basis of their resistance to a world which tries to erase them.”
Yet, while Ferrante has become a subject of university study in the UK, there’s more reticence, even snootiness, about her in Italian academic circles. Here, realist plots are often less valued than experimental, highbrow works and some intellectuals sense something soap opera-ish about Ferrante. One Italian literary critic, Stefano Jossa, wrote a polemic recently under the provocative headline: “Ferrante shouldn’t be studied at university”. If she’s going to be studied, he wrote, it should be to analyse and deconstruct the mythography, not to add to it.
So for all those reasons there’s huge anticipation surrounding this adaptation. Ferrante herself was a script adviser and the director Saverio Costanzo said recently that working with the famous recluse was like “working with a ghost”. But Costanzo probably felt he was working with many other ghosts beyond Ferrante, because the artistic ancestors of this production are the country’s great neorealist directors: De Sica, Visconti, Rossellini and Fellini. Like them, Costanzo has cast many non-professional actors and sought to portray the rawness of the postwar period with all its destitution and opportunities, with its clash of ancient and modern. There are dusty fields, abandoned buildings, stray dogs, goatherds and only one or two cars. The Neapolitan dialect is so thick that there are subtitles even for Italians.
But those neorealist directors were invariably portraying and interpreting their own present, whereas this adaptation is a costume drama. The set was built from scratch and it appears strangely spacious and – a word one would never normally associate with Naples – neat. The city is noisy, frenetic, creative and soiled, so the bare set is unsettling, but that was precisely Costanzo’s intention: “A reconstructed set,” he told me, “creates disorientation in the spectator.”
The Guardian: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend: how does the show compare to the books?
Can director Saverio Costanzo and a cast of non-professional actors do justice to Ferrante’s radical vision of postwar Naples?
On The Guardian
Lisa Allardice – Nov 17, 2018
“Lila is overdoing it as usual,” Elena Greco begins her story, both in Elena Ferrante’s much-loved novel My Brilliant Friend and in a feverishly anticipated TV adaptation. “We’ll see who wins this time.” And thus a narrative of 50 years of friendship and rivalry opens, transporting us back to the slum Naples district of their postwar childhood.
The first in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, My Brilliant Friend is a breathless, breathtaking love story – but not between a hero and heroine. Above all, the novels are a lingering, obsessive exercise in bringing two young woman into being. While literature is hardly short of female characters scorched on to the page by the male gaze, what makes this book so unusual is that the looking is done by another girl: and in the adaptation the emphasis is all on looking – we watch the girls watching the adult world around them. In the many passages dedicated to noticing that moment when a girl becomes a beautiful woman, Elena’s rapt description of her friend is as charged as that of any lover: “She had become shapely. Her high forehead, her large eyes that she could suddenly narrow, her small nose, her cheekbones, her lips and ears that were looking for a new orchestration and seemed close to finding it.” The reader, like everyone in the neighbourhood, can’t help but fall in love with Lila.
Elena and Lila (Lenù and Lina – even their nicknames are echoes of each other) are two sides of our romanticised selves, constantly shifting in their fragility and fearlessness. And while we know that life is giving Elena chances (all too rare given her background), that her diligence and determination will be rewarded, her insecurities overcome, it is still Lila who we want to be. (Who does not long to be bolder, brainier, beautiful and a little bit bad – brilliant, in short?) But the characters also show us our worst selves: here is true friendship, passionate, sometimes painful and often shamefully ungenerous. They might spend hours lost in Little Women, but this is girlhood as we remember it.
While Ferrante is still an enigma, preferring to remain anonymous, her fiction has become a global phenomenon, counting Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton among its largely, but not exclusively, female devotees (New Yorker critic James Wood and novelist Jonathan Franzen were early champions): her novels have sold in their millions and fans make pilgrimages to the Naples streets on which they are set. So it is a brave and lucky man, Saverio Costanzo who has been chosen to direct and help adapt the novels for the screen.
The Atlantic: The Gorgeous Savagery of My Brilliant Friend
The HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s first Neapolitan novel is a strikingly faithful achievement.
Sophie Gilbert – Nov 16, 2018
‘My Brilliant Friend’ Review: Ferrante Adaptation Packs an Emotional Wallop
by Alan Sepinwall
HBO’s gorgeous limited series based on Italian author Elena Ferrante’s acclaimed book follows a passionate and challenging friendship to searing effect
The title character of HBO’s My Brilliant Friend is Lila Cerullo, a shoemaker’s daughter in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples in the Fifties. Defying all odds of both nature and nurture, she is a prodigy who masters whatever task she sets her mind to, usually without any outside instruction. As an elementary schooler, she reads Little Women and is inspired to write her own novel. Best friend Elena “Lenu” Greco reads it and is amazed by how naturally Lila articulates all her points.
The adult Elena, who narrates the series, will say of Lila’s book, simply, “It was special.”
So is My Brilliant Friend (it debuts Sunday; I’ve seen six of eight episodes, all in Italian with English subtitles), which roughly covers the events of the book of the same name by Elena Ferrante, the first in her quartet of novels about the long and complicated friendship between Lila and Lenu.
Lenu (played as a little girl by Elisa Del Genio, then as a teenager by Margherita Mazzucco) is simultaneously worshipful and jealous of Lila (played first by Ludovica Nasti, then by Gaia Girace), who is everything Lenu tries to be, only better. Lenu is pretty; Lila is striking, and there’s a sense that any boy who shows interest in the former is only using her to get to the latter. Lenu is smart; Lila is a genius. When the local library gives out prizes to the residents who have checked out the most books, Lenu finishes in fifth place; the top four spots all go to Lila, who has borrowed books under both her own name and her relatives’. Lenu is only as brave as Lila’s presence allows her to be. When they are apart for long stretches, Lenu seems like she is being slowly starved of oxygen, and it’s only when she is back in her friend’s company that she can breathe and thrive again. But that rare air comes with the price of making Lenu feel like she can never be more than second-best.
This is very complicated, subtle emotional territory to explore. But the TV adaptation — directed by Saverio Costanzo, who wrote it with Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Ferrante herself — covers the material with beauty and grace. The creative team understands first and foremost that the two girls are products of a specific post-war time and place, and focuses as much on building out that world as on establishing the uneven power dynamics of the central relationship. The neighborhood exists as an ecosystem unto itself, and the series explores and establishes every nook and cranny of the place. It finds unexpected beauty in all the browns and grays, and makes the area seem so disconnected from the rest of the world that it’s startling when later episodes venture out into Naples proper, or to the gorgeous island of Ischia, where the teenage Lenu spends a summer away from Lila.
TV Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’ on HBO
Variety
The many admirers of Elena Ferrante’s novel “My Brilliant Friend” — the first in her smash series of four books about a pair of Neapolitan women moving through life — likely have two questions about the Italian-language TV adaptation. The first is how faithful it is to the source material, and the second is how well it matches the novel’s effortless ability to move within its protagonist’s mind, tracking subtleties of emotion.
The answers are mainly good news: In the limited series’ first two installments, screened at the Venice Film Festival Sept. 2 before a November bow on HBO, the story closely tracks the movement of the novel. And while achieving the internality of the book is too high an order for this series, its ability to conjure up the world of children confused at the happenings around them is its own achievement. “My Brilliant Friend” is an impressive effort, a translation of novel to screen that preserves certain of its literary qualities while transmuting others into moving and effective TV.
Elena (Elisabetta De Palo), seen briefly in a framing device, receives a call that her old friend has gone missing, and, knowing that this disappearance had been a long time coming, finally sits down to write the story of their intertwined lives. We shift back in time to the dusty and sun-drunk Naples of the 1950s, where Elena (played as a child by Elisa Del Genio) spent her girlhood, in the perpetual company of the bright but troublesome Lila (Ludovica Nasti). Later in the series, we’ll see them as teenagers.
As we see young Lila throwing crumpled paper at teacher’s-pet Elena, De Palo’s voice intones, “She impressed me at once because she was so bad.” The voice-over device seeks to accomplish the same thing as did the narration of the novel, documenting every childish thought with the wisdom of adulthood. But this device is less than necessary. Young Del Genio and Nasti have the unforced chemistry of the kids from “The Florida Project,” the last great entertainment about kids left largely unsupervised. And their frolics in a community whose rules they barely understand make far more potent points about the innocence of youth, and how it falls away, than the voice-over ever could.
In one striking scene, the pair are reading “Little Women” together as a fight breaks out; the viewer has been able to track the complicated social dynamics leading up to it, but to the children, it’s just noise, one among many interruptions that must be endured as a part of a childhood ending too quickly.
FIRST OFFICIAL IMAGES FROM THE HBO, RAI FICTION AND TIMVISION SERIES MY BRILLIANT FRIEND, DIRECTED BY SAVERIO COSTANZO, ARE RELEASED
Show Is Based On The First Book Of Elena Ferrante’s Bestselling Quadrilogy
An HBO-RAI FICTION And TIMVISION Production;
Produced By Lorenzo Mieli And Mario Gianani For Wildside And
By Domenico Procacci For Fandango
In Co-Production With Umedia Production
With production underway in Caserta, Italy, the first official images from the HBO, RAI FICTION and TIMVISION series MY BRILLIANT FRIEND have been released. Based on Elena Ferrante’s bestselling book of the same name, which is the first of her four-part series published in the U.S. by Europa Editions, the eight-episode series is being directed by Saverio Costanzo (“Private,” “The Solitude of Prime Numbers,” “Hungry Hearts”).
Casting for the show took place over a period of eight months, with almost 9,000 children and 500 adults from all over Campania auditioning. The casting process included professional and non-professional actors, as well as students recruited from local schools. Newcomers Elisa Del Genio and Ludovica Nasti were chosen to portray the two lead roles of Elena and Lila as young children.
As production on the series progresses, these young actresses have given way to teenage actresses Margherita Mazzucco as Elena and Gaia Girace as Lila. In total, MY BRILLIANT FRIEND is expected to include a cast of more than 150 actors and 5,000 extras.
The production’s construction team of 150 crew members has created 215,000 square feet of sets, which were built over 100 days. To recreate the neighborhood, the symbolic location of the story, they built 14 exterior apartment buildings, five interior sets of apartments, a church and a tunnel. The costume department is gathering 1,500 costumes, many of which are original creations.
MY BRILLIANT FRIEND is an HBO, RAI FICTION and TIMVISION series, produced by Lorenzo Mieli and Mario Gianani for Wildside and by Domenico Procacci for Fandango in co-production with Umedia Production. All episodes will be directed by Saverio Costanzo. Story and screenplays by Elena Ferrante, Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Saverio Costanzo. Jennifer Schuur is the executive producer. FremantleMedia International will act as the international distributor.