A rich drama set in a poor neighbourhood
New HBO series based on Neopolitan novels is as bright as its heroines
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.
Lenù (played by Elisa Del Genio as a girl, Margherita Mazzucco as a teenager) is studious and reserved, a people pleaser. Lila (Ludovica Nasti and Gaia Girace) is prodigiously smart, with a fierce charisma and a prophet’s coal-eyed intensity. They’re two bright girls in a community that doesn’t know what to do with bright girls.
As they get older, their lives diverge. Lenù’s parents keep her in school (an expense her mother resents). Lila, a shoe repairman’s daughter, drops out to work but devours books and teaches herself Latin and Greek, mastering effortlessly what Lenù strains to achieve.
My Brilliant Friend is constantly conscious of how money and small gradations of privilege change lives. When you’re poor, aspiration can become a burden, something that makes your parents angry. If you have a gift, like Lila does, you must use it as a tool, to free yourself. “To escape this neighbourhood,” she announces, “you need money.”
An international co-production directed by Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo, My Brilliant Friend is scripted in Italian, which makes its cloistered world all the more immersive. You see the world expand through the eyes of two girls: days of dullness, punctuated by men beating each other in the street and women raging out windows.
A scene imagines the town’s quiet anger, in Lenù’s fantasy, as a swarm of insects that teem from the sewers at night, “making our mothers as angry as starving dogs.”
All four actresses in the pivotal roles are astounding. Nasti and Girace convey Lila’s genius maturing into volatility. Del Genio and Mazzucco have the less showy but equally complex role: Lenù is insightful, yet her emotions are enigmatic even to herself.
In the few places My Brilliant Friend stumbles, it is from an excess of faithfulness to the source. The series keeps the framing device — an older Lenù sets out to write the story after getting a call that Lila has gone missing — and therefore the narration, which in the novel helped sketch the complicated inner life of the reserved Lenù.
Overall, though, it’s no small thing how well and how often My Brilliant Friend finds TV correlatives for the luminous art of Ferrante, the series’ unseen star.
My Brilliant Friend still stands out in an HBO drama-series lineup that has been dominated by turbulent men.