A powerful and nuanced story of a bygone era
Anovelist’s devotees approach adaptations with a wary tread. And none can be more nervous than fans of Elena Ferrante’s megahit sequence of Neapolitan novels about a lifelong friendship between two women. No one could accuse
(Sky Atlantic) of being insufficiently Italian. It was shot in Italy where the inhabitants of tightly cluttered tenements speak a richly clotted southern dialect – your holiday Italian won’t get you far here.
Meanwhile, those anxious that Ferrante’s first-person prose would go for a burton are treated to lashings of textured voice-over. Often a voiceover is a confession of storytelling failure. Not here. In the opening scene of the eight-part series, recently also adapted for the stage, an elderly Elena (Elisabetta De Palo) coolly learnt that her lifelong friend Lila had vanished, expunging all trace of herself from wardrobes and photographs. Promptly she embarked on the epic quest to commit her friend’s narrative to paper as we spooled back to the Fifties and young Elena writing in class. This was to be a story about stories.
Atmospherically it felt like an authentic descendant of the films of Italy’s postwar neo-realism, a nuanced mulch of stoical poverty and extravagant emotionalism. You didn’t know whether to laugh or weep in the set-piece scenes, when the local madly grieving widow Melina hurled breakables into the piazza. Or as the schoolboys’ weaselly teacher desperately sought to prove his pupils cleverer than the girls, or when the respectful calm of a funeral was interrupted by violence.
They will be replaced by older actresses later in the series of course, but the two young leads – Elisa del Genio as the watchful Elena Greco and Ludovica Nasti as pugnacious Lila Cerullo – have established a remarkably high standard. Their burgeoning mutual fascination is already making for an intense twohander about a friendship fired in the kiln of childhood. As for the wider society that frames them, normally these teeming Bruegelesque canvases require you to make the acquaintance of too many characters at once, but there’s already a sharp sense of who’s who. Perhaps it helps that this is a community without secrets, where every convulsion is witnessed by all.
The director Saverio Costanzo is one of four co-writers of the script alongside Ferrante herself. Anyone who hasn’t encountered her story in the original (guilty) can already feel confident that something riveting is about to unfold.
In recent years noirish dramas have flooded into Britain from all corners of Europe. The one country that has been quiet is the neighbour with whom the UK shares an actual land border. Drama made in Ireland is very much not a thing. But, following this opening double-bill, there will be on Channel 5 for the next four nights.
So far, the script by Sophie Petzal is obedient to known codes and rubrics. A rural community steadily disinters its very dingiest secrets at a rate of one knuckle-gnawing revelation per advert break. Already we’re looking at a potential murder, a possible police cover-up, and a family intent upon hiding all sorts of stuff from one another, including infidelity, homosexuality and child abuse.
And hello again to that welltravelled set-up, the black sheep who returns home for a parent’s death to be met with accusing stares for having stayed away. “Where’ve they been hiding you?” said a copper to Cat Hogan (Carolina Main) as he found her next to a pool of vomit on the public highway at night.
Main multitasks in a role which requires her to play a paranoid neurotic being gaslighted by her family while also a calm and eagleeyed sleuth. But the main draw is Adrian Dunbar as her father Jim, a trusted pillar of society and beloved patriarch who only Cat knows as being a nasty piece of work. Dunbar, having embodied moral cleanliness in Line of Duty, is cannily cast as a snake, and enjoyed getting his chops round a couple of two-faced speeches.
Director Lisa Mulcahy has not gone full noir on us. There are plenty of night scenes and spooky tropes (the inevitable squeaky sounds in the night caused, or so it seemed, by the cat). But the tourist board can purr with pleasure at all the drone shots of leafy lanes. The tone similarly veers between long-faced gloom and folksy good cheer. As a Celtic village thriller, Blood doesn’t yet grip like, say, the oh-so-moreish Keeping Faith.
My Brilliant Friend Blood