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.