MY BRILLIANT FRIEND is currently airing on HBO and Sky Atlantic. But how is the series different from the Elena Ferrante book the show is based on?
Samuel Spencer – Nov 20, 2018
Elena Ferrante
Express: My Brilliant Friend on HBO cast: Who is in the cast of My Brilliant Friend?
MY BRILLIANT FRIEND started on HBO this week bring the renowned Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante to the screen. Here’s a look at the cast.
Emma Nolan, Nov 21 2018
New Italian-language miniseries My Brilliant Friend premiered this week on HBO and SkyAtlantic. The drama is an adaptation of the beloved Neapolitan Novels series by Elena Ferrante. A coming of age story, the eight-episode series follows a friendship between two young girls in Naples in the 1950s.
The synopsis from HBO reads: “When the most important friend in her life seems to have disappeared without a trace, Elena Greco, a now-elderly woman immersed in a house full of books, turns on her computer and starts writing the story of their friendship.”
Both Elena and Lila are portrayed as children and teenagers.
So there are two actors playing each character at the different stages in their lives.
All four actresses are complete newcomers with My Brilliant Friend being their first acting roles ever.
The Nation: HBO’s Hauntingly Faithful Adaptation of ‘My Brilliant Friend’
The TV series is just as unflinching and intimate as Elena Ferrante’s novel.
Sarah Marshall – Nov 20, 2018
In the first episode of My Brilliant Friend, the feverishly anticipated HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of Neapolitan girlhood, the story’s child protagonist, Elena Greco, hardly speaks. As the series begins, we see Elena at 60, and then at 6; the youthful Elena is played by Elisa Del Genio, an actor whose performance is mostly reactive, her angelically mournful face offering viewers an empathetic keyhole into her world. When she speaks, we are primed to pay close attention. From its first moments, My Brilliant Friend dedicates itself to the high drama—the joy, trauma, and mystery—of what many would call an unremarkable life, which is to say, in many ways, a woman’s life, and a girl’s.
In the bleak, impoverished neighborhood of her 1950s youth, the older Elena reflects in her voice-over, mothers were “as angry as starving dogs…. The men were always getting furious, but then they calmed down, whereas the women flew into a rage that had no limit and no end.” The viewer, watching young Elena react silently to a vicious brawl between the mothers in her building—a fight over the scarce love of men; a contest between the starving—is given a chance to see the darkness of the world that she is hurtling toward. There will be many other moments that afford a similar view.
The viewer experiences this scene as a hauntingly faithful gloss on the novel: Elena imagines tiny, swarming animals crawling up the stairwell of her building and into the apartments, the beds, and finally the women, a cockroach-like infestation of rage. Elena’s narration about these furious women, lifted directly from the book’s text, is now dramatized. The series itself feels like an exploration of where language can take us in such a medium, and where we must leave language behind and let the images do the work—and every viewer who was once a reader of Ferrante’s novel will have different answers to this question.
BuzzFeed News: HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend” Shows The Life-And-Death Stakes Of Elena Ferrante’s Novel
As a reader, it’s easy to gloss over the violence and chaos in Ferrante’s story of two girls growing up in mid-century Naples. Onscreen, it’s much more urgent.
Ruth Curry – Nov 20,2018
What does a bad neighborhood look like in Naples, circa 1950? Monochromatic, drab, with dark soot and graying plaster and baked dirt puffing up in clouds when a cart or motorcycle or the rare automobile goes by. Laundry flapping everywhere, not quite clean. No greenery, no water, even though Naples is on the coast. Men clump in idle groups of three and four outside while indoors the women scream — at each other, their children, to no one at all. Brutal fights break out, three or four against one; the victim slumps bloody in the gutter and eventually his children help him up, crying, limping.
“We lived in a world in which children and adults were often wounded, blood flowed from the wounds, they festered, and sometimes people died. … Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection,” Elena Ferrante writes in My Brilliant Friend, the first in her quartet of novels about the coming of age of two girls in postwar Naples, which has now been adapted by the Italian director Saverio Costanzo into a miniseries for HBO, which began airing Nov. 18.
The AV Club: Like a fascinating new companion, My Brilliant Friend immediately pulls you into its orbit
Allison Shoemaker – Nov 18, 2018
It marks a major turning point in “Le Bambole (The Dolls)” when the daring Lila (Ludovica Nasti) stands in the courtyard of several apartment buildings, calling up to Lenù (Elisa Del Genio) to come out and play. It’s a big step. Before this moment, the two girls alternately circled, struck out at, or studied each other (the last, largely Lenù’s domain). They have connected in brief flashes, but this is a chance to turn a corner. Lila calls up, Lenù hears her, and it takes her only a moment to decide. She’ll come down, and a friendship will begin.
By the time she reaches the ground floor, Lila has turned a corner of her own—a literal one, around which she’s being violently confronted by one of the neighborhood’s big bad wolves. As she shouts up into the older boy’s face, we see Lenù process what’s happening, and realize the choice before her. But is it a choice? She came down those stairs. She’s in this now. She stands up for her new friend just as Lila stands up for herself, and within moments, they’re crumpled side by side in the dust.
Forbes: The Female Rage That Powers HBO’s ‘My Brilliant Friend’
Sarah Aswell – Nov 19, 2018
During the first episode of My Brilliant Friend, women and girls fill the stairwell of a Naples apartment building–not a man is present. At the center of the action is two women fighting, while others try to separate them, and while the younger girls look on in confusion and horror. When one woman tumbles down the stairs, the protagonist of the story, Elena, faints while looking on.
The screen goes black, and the the narrator–an adult Elena–speaks:
As a child, I imagined tiny animals that came out of ponds, the abandoned train cars, the stones, the dust, and made their way into the water, the food, the air, making our mothers as angry as starving dogs. The men were always getting furious but then they calmed down, whereas the women flew into a rage that had no limit and no end.
As she speaks, a terrifying surreal moment in an otherwise realistic series takes place: we see horrifying black bugs pouring out of the sewers and streets and crawling into the mouths of the city’s sleeping mothers.
The Cut: My Brilliant Friend Is Missing the Best Part of the Books
Anna Silman – Nov 19, 2018
There are a lot of things I liked about HBO’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’sMy Brilliant Friend. I appreciated the chic Eileen Fisher-esque linen gowns worn by the show’s Italian tweens, I enjoyed the detailed vistas of 1950s Naples, and I loved the precocious child actors chosen to populate the show’s world. But throughout, I couldn’t help but feel that the show was missing an essential feature of the books: the index of character names.
When I first read Elena Ferrante’s epic quartet, The Neapolitan Novels, a few years ago — at the height of my Ferrante fever — I became weirdly obsessed with the indexes. Each book opens with a list of characters, grouped by family unit. We are introduced to the shoemaker’s family and the grocer’s family and the fruit-seller’s family and the baker’s family, followed by short descriptions of each member. This intertwining network of clans serve as the basis for the books’ social world, which grows more complex over time. My time reading the series was spent in a flurry of perpetual motion — flipping to the front of the book, flipping back to where I was, then flipping back to the front again — to make sure I was right about where each character fit in (I developed carpal tunnel right around the time Elena Greco, the porter’s daughter, and Lila Cerullo, the shoemaker’s daughter, graduated primary school). Continue reading
Vox: HBO’s My Brilliant Friend adaptation is a knockout
Even if you’ve never read Elena Ferrante’s novels, this new eight-episode series will have you gripped.
Todd VanDerWerff – Nov 18, 2018
I haven’t read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the best-selling, heavily acclaimed quartet of books that form the basis for HBO’s new My Brilliant Friend. (Each book will be an eight-episode season of the show; I’ve seen seven of the eight episodes of season one, based on the first book, called, well, My Brilliant Friend.)
I know, I know. This is horrifying. Didn’t everybody read those books a few years ago? And pass them along to their friends with hushed admiration and excitement for everything the mysterious Ferrante (whose real identity is — at least officially — a secret) accomplished? And feel the tremendous power of Ferrante’s evocation of a bygone era in Italy? Well? Didn’t they?
It’s not that I had anything against the books — I always meant to read them, I swear — and I present this fact as the basis of what I’m going to say next: Freed from the hype surrounding the titles, and the questions on Ferrante’s identity, and everything else, this new series is a knockout, excavating the core story of the books and creating a beautiful coming-of-age tale, brimming with nostalgia, sorrow, and humor.
(I also say this because critics who have read the books seem to believe the series is a good adaptation, but perhaps too direct of an adaptation. So take that for what it’s worth, book fans.)
I never felt like I was missing out on something having not read the source material. I always felt like I understood what it was people adore about Ferrante’s world. And for me, at least, it is a triumph of world-building, as potent and richly realized as any sci-fi or fantasy show.
Huffington Post: Let The HBO Adaptation Of Elena Ferrante’s ‘My Brilliant Friend’ Turn You Into A Socialist
Consciousness can be raised through any medium, including one that can cost over $100 a month.
Claire Fallon – Nov 16,2018
Socialist prestige TV is here. Yes, consciousness can be raised through any medium, including one that costs over $100* a month, like premium cable. Bit by bit, anti-capitalist sentiments have been worming their way into the most vital cultural product of our era, from Samin Nosrat’s Netflix cooking show “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” to, most recently, HBO’s new series adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, “My Brilliant Friend.”
The series, like the first novel in Ferrante’s quartet, is told by Elena “Lenù” Greco, an older woman reflecting on her girlhood in a working-class neighborhood in 1950s Naples. In her retelling, little Lenù befriends Raffaela “Lila” Cerullo, the daughter of a cobbler and the cleverest girl in her class. Lenù, also a top student, is impressed by her rival’s brains, but by also her rebellious spirit and courage; early on, Lila shows little patience for bullies or social norms. The two become inseparable as children and cling to a fraught but profound friendship even as, through adolescence and young adulthood, their paths diverge: Lenù continues her education and grows more detached from the mundane violence of their neighborhood. Lila is forced to give up formal schooling and becomes immersed in attempts to better her condition, both through socialist ideology and schemes to design and sell superior shoes from her father’s shop.
If Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels had been published under a man’s name, if they had featured a friendship between two poor but clever boys from Naples or perhaps if they’d come to the U.S. just a few years later, conversations about the quartet would have begun with its keen-eyed explorations of Italian politics ― specifically, socialist organizing. It’s a central, inescapable concern of the series. In a Jacobin article this April, Dawn Tefft praised Ferrante as “the organizer’s organizer.” The later books, set amid the political upheaval of Italy in the 1970s, dwell upon the logistics of organizing factory workers, the roles of the privileged and oppressed in activist spaces, the urgency and crushing impossibility of revolution.
USA Today: Why HBO’s beautiful ‘My Brilliant Friend’ is in Italian, with subtitles
Kelly Lawler – Nov 16, 2018
In the second episode of HBO’s new series “My Brilliant Friend,” two precocious young girls reverently recite passages from “Little Women,” garnering hope and strength and inspiration from Louisa May Alcott’s words.
Author Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” book series is regarded with similar reverence, around the world but especially in her home country, Italy, the setting of the coming-of-age epics about two girls growing up in post-World War II Naples. As with so many book-to-screen adaptations, from “Harry Potter” to “Gone Girl,” bringing Ferrante’s words to the screen required extreme care, so as to not upset the legions of fans for whom the books have meant so much. HBO’s version of “Friend” (Sunday and Monday, 9 EST/PST, ★★★½ out of four) keeps the story of little Elena (Elisa Del Genio as a young girl, and Margherita Mazzucco as a teenager) and her brilliant friend Raffaella (Ludovica Nasti and Gaia Girace, respectively) in the language it was written with English subtitles, in part for authenticity and in part because it’s an Italian co-production. Whatever the motives, it was the right decision for this beautiful, buoyant story of friendship, survival and growing up. “Friend” is, for lack of a better word, quite brilliant.
The Washington Post: What the women of ‘My Brilliant Friend’ tell us about the men of ‘The Godfather’
This piece discusses some of the plot details of “My Brilliant Friend,” but man oh man is the mood more the point than the plot here.
Alyssa Rosenberg – Nov 16, 2018
In the bravura wedding scene that opens director Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” brother of the bride Sonny Corleone, played by James Caan, pinches the cheek of bridesmaid Lucy Mancini (Jeannie Linero) and later slips off with her for a clandestine liaison. From these few brief scenes, you’d never know that Lucy is a fully developed character in Mario Puzo’s novel of the same name: She helps set up the Corleone family operations in Las Vegas, and the book explores her grief after Sonny’s assassination and her journey back to romantic and sexual happiness.
I think about Lucy Mancini a lot, not so much because her story is a major loss to movie history, but because she represents the women in the margins who bear the consequences of the main character’s decisions. And she was never on my mind so frequently as when I watched HBO’s adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend,” the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, which debuts on Nov. 18. It would be a disservice to “My Brilliant Friend” to treat it as a mere addendum to “The Godfather.” But watching the movie series and the miniseries together is a powerful testament to what we gain when we see the world both from the center and the margins.
The New Yorker: HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend” understands Its Source Material, But Its Diligence Feels Misspent
Katy Waldman – Nov 16, 2018
She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.” That is Elena Greco, the narrator of the novel “My Brilliant Friend,” talking about Lila Cerullo, the brilliant friend of the title and the other main character in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, a series of novels about two girls growing up in working-class Italy in the nineteen-fifties. Elena, known as Lenu, finds Lila’s way of speaking electrifying. But her analysis also applies to Ferrante, who imbues the details of chores and school with a crackling power that is difficult to describe or account for. Something happens when Ferrante reduces reality to words; the lines move like a child darting through traffic. How do you translate such forceful, hypnotic expression to the screen? That challenge both shapes and bedevils HBO’s new television adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend,” directed by Saverio Costanzo.
The Neapolitan novels follow Lenu and Lila as they support and compete with each other in a town shadowed by poverty and political strife. Lila is fierce, impossible, and uncanny. “She always did the things I was supposed to do, before me and better than me,” Lenu says. “She eluded me when I chased her, and at the same time, she kept on my heels to overtake me.” Lila, a shoemaker’s daughter, excels at school but quits to help her father at his shop, while Lenu keeps on, applying herself to Latin and Greek. Who will earn praise as a scholar, and who will inspire envy as a wife, and which option is more desirable? These are the questions haunting this first phase of their friendship.
One tenet of the Ferrante critical-industrial complex is that Ferrante’s novels have a dark, fairy-tale quality, as if some mysterious logic were at work beneath the surfaces of things. (“My Brilliant Friend” features a village, an ogre, and magical shoes.) Characters are deep and complicated; their interactions are charged. Everything feels meaningful, but the meanings are slippery and dangerous. “I had the impression that . . . many things, too many, were scattering around me without letting me grasp them,” Lenu says. This intimation of hidden, roiling histories and repressed understandings can seem like the book’s governing sensation.
Boston Herald: Unforgettable ‘Friend’: HBO adapts Elena Ferrante’s tale charting Neapolitan girls’ relationship
Mark Pergald – Nov 18, 2018
Elena Ferrante is one of the most beloved authors in the world.
The elusive, reclusive writer (her real identity is a mystery) has created the Neapolitan Novels, a cycle of four books released starting in 2012 with “My Brilliant Friend” that charts the fraught friendship between two women, starting when they are girls in 1950s Naples.
The novels are acclaimed for their ability to capture a tumultuous period in Italy’s history as well as the complicated bonds of devotion and lifelong resentments. They would seem to be impossible to adapt.
And yet here we are, and so much the better for it.
HBO, in conjunction with the Italian networks RAI and TIMvision, presents the first of her novels, broken into eight hourlong episodes, with Ferrante helping to script. The series draws you into a world of just a few blocks shared by several impoverished families crammed in decrepit apartments. It’s the kind of neighborhood where the local don can yank a mourner out of a church funeral service and beat him and the priest and the parishioners stare the other way.
Toronto Star: My Brilliant Friend’s visualization of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels is no less transporting than Game of Thrones
James Poniewozik – Nov 17, 2018
In 2011, HBO began a series based on a set of books whose legion of fans had exacting expectations. Game of Thrones required condensing a vast narrative, visualizing wonders like dragons’ flight and creating a world that spanned continents.
HBO’s new series My Brilliant Friend, based on the wildly popular Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, is a different but no smaller challenge. The story of a febrile and rivalrous friendship between two girls in a working-class Italian neighbourhood in the 1950s, it is as intimate as Thrones is sweeping.
The first season, which begins Sunday, is set largely in a single cluster of apartments. Its drama, though punctuated by violence, is interior and inwardly focused. It enfolds warring families and shifting alliances, but in a setting where everyone is packed close and prying eyes and whispers are inescapable.
It is a game of courtyards, stairwells and balconies. But as earthbound as it is, My Brilliant Friend is no less transporting.For readers of the books, it is probably enough to know that the first season, which corresponds to the first of the four novels, sticks close to the source material. For newcomers, that is the story of Elena Greco, called Lenù, and Rafaella Cerullo, called Lila. They form an ardent bond their first year of school, in a dusty, lowrise neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples.
Paste Magazine: Elena Ferrante, HBO’s My Brilliant Friend, and the “Unadaptable” Novel
Amy Glynn – Nov 16, 2018
As I’ve noted more than once, I was a latecomer to The Handmaid’s Tale when it came to Hulu. I was not interested. I understood why the novel was popular but I always considered it the most pasty, two-dimensional and politically irritating of Margaret Atwood’s many admirable literary works; I might never have seen it at all if I had a different job. To my surprise, and despite its significant flaws, I loved the show. I can quibble about any number of narrative choices, but artistically I think it’s absolutely top-drawer—and, interestingly, considering it uses the novel as a springboard more than a template, I consider it an unusually high-fidelity adaptation. Even in its second season, which begins after the novel ends and takes off into pure speculation, Bruce Miller and his strikingly talented ensemble cast wring full-fledged contemporary characters from the Pilgrim’s Progress-style cardboard cutouts that populated the book. The book had a legitimate and coherent style, to be sure, but it would not have made good television had it been replicated precisely “by the book.” Some of Atwood’s hallmark stylistic traits—extreme interiority; contemplative stillness; a cool, painterly prose sensibility—would have failed in a medium that places a high value on action and chemistry.
Now, HBO has brought an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s lauded novel My Brilliant Friend to the screen. And there’s a funny little metaphor lurking in, of all places, the subtitles. The subtitles are in English. The original novel is written in Italian. But the characters speak Neapolitan, an Italian-oid language that’s largely (though not completely) mutually comprehensible with Italian and also has roots in Greek and an extinct language called Oscan. Why is this funny, or metaphorical, or remotely relevant? Well, language is everything in this book, and I mean both Ferrante’s stunning prose and the fact that within the story, languages are plot devices, character designators, and shorthand for very important threads of class and education and mobility, without which there’s relatively little story. The two main characters, Elena Greco (Margherita Mazzucco in childhood; Elisa Del Genio as a teenager) and Lila Cerullo (Ludovica Nasti and Gaia Girace) are bright young girls with an intense friendship based largely on competition, specifically academic competition and the acquisition of languages. Whether characters in the book speak “proper” Italian or Neapolitan is a marker of belonging, a political statement, an implied story about the character’s position in an often brutal and violent hierarchy. So much of this is both figuratively and literally lost in translation when you lift the story out of its native medium that it might be an especially burnished example of a novel that cannot be rendered faithfully and well at the same time.