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Darren Franich – Nov 15, 2018
I spent a happy month this year living in thrall to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, a four-part saga following two women across the back half of the 20th century. Ferrante addiction is a global pandemic, of course. Since the 2012 publication of the first volume, My Brilliant Friend, the series has sold an estimated kamillion copies in an estimated bazillion countries. Their sweep is epic, moving with mathematical precision from a particularly memorable school competition, through long days in a working class neighborhood, into great political upheavals and greater personal tragedies. In macro, the mind races for heavy comparisons: Woolf, Tolstoy, Eliot, the other Eliot. And Ferrante’s style is intimate, confessional, very funny. It has the unputdownable quality of one of those Twitter stories that used to go viral before Twitter was an all-consuming virus, a cheerful personal anecdote spiraling toward almost psychedelic rage.
Now My Brilliant Friend has been adapted into a series, with an eight-episode debut season rolling out on HBO starting Nov. 18. (Further seasons would, theoretically, adapt the later books.) The six episodes I’ve seen are a graceful adaptation of Ferrante’s first volume, brought to life by a talented young cast of mostly unknown performers. Director Saverio Costanzo films this coming-of-age story with admirable fluency. The show can’t compete with the book for sheer hallucinatory artistry. But by the third episode, you’re successful invested in a large cast, multiple local families all blessed with what you could call a classically Catholic amount of children.
It’s a whole community brought to fearful life. More simply, this is the story of a woman remembering her youth. We meet elderly Elena (Elisabetta De Palo) in the present-ish day. Her childhood friend Lila has just disappeared. This absence sends her back through memories of postwar Naples. Here we meet young Elena (Elisa Del Genio), a quiet and thoughtful child. She falls under the spell of Lila (Ludovica Nasti), charismatically tough in a manner her society might describe as “willful.”
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