Show + tell: Paul Flynn’s top TV
The complex layers of female relationships are expertly peeled back in the utterly engrossing My Brilliant Friend
THE TV ADAPTATION of Elena Ferrante’s wildly successful, resoundingly amazing novel My Brilliant Friend – the first in her quartet of Neapolitan novels – opens with a mobile phone ringing, lighting up a black screen. The light it casts, much like the shadowy recesses of communication that Ferrante is interested in, dapples out across the picture. If you are looking for a thoughtful, stylish television fix, you’ve found it.
A stern woman in her sixties with a classy silvery bob and voluptuous bookshelf answers the call. Her friend has gone missing. She resolves to tell her story, to write it down, not so much as a mawkish tribute to her lost friend, but as a contemplation of the cruelty of life itself, the twists and turns it throws at you, despite your supposed ownership of the narrative.
We are whisked back to 1950s Naples, a peasant village, the seat of the brilliant friendship. Delicious gossip – accrued from local sex, violence, poverty and religion – is swapped across Juliet balconies while robust mamas shake out their drying laundry. In an infant classroom, Elena and Lila strike up an unlikely bond. Elena is the more cautious of the two, but utterly absorbed by Lila’s unwieldly behaviour. Both appear touched by some minor child genius syndrome. They swap dolls and throw them down a chute. Someone dies. Fights break out everywhere.
Ferrante’s great skill is to strip childhood of its sentimentality and to relay it with streaks of bitterness, competitiveness and obsession. She’s co-written the script here. My Brilliant Friend – indeed the entire Neapolitan suite, which is pencilled to play out over four eight-episode seasons – is about female friendship stripped of its feel-good factor. What emerges is a story of richness, detail and truth.
What has happened to Lila in her old age? Why has she cut herself out of her own photographs and left a son worrying for her well-being? Over the course of a troubled lifetime, all is revealed in sometimes scary, often ferociously brave storytelling. My Brilliant Friend looks just as wonderful on the television screen as it lived in the imagination. The perversity of life’s lessons, taught in and out of classrooms, are rendered beautiful and hard all at once. This is how society shapes us. Begins 19 November, 9pm, Sky Atlantic