Believe me, My Brilliant Friend is the best TV drama in years
This adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s bestselling Neapolitan novels should be on everyone’s watchlist, says Chris Bennion
You can have a hard time convincing someone to watch My Brilliant Friend. You see them wince a tiny bit when you mention it’s subtitled – how can I look at Twitter, they are thinking – and you struggle to keep their interest when you tell them it’s about the oscillating friendship between two young girls in postwar Naples. Oh, postwar Naples is it, they mutter, trying to sound interested.
When you remind them it’s adapted from Elena Ferrante’s bestselling Neapolitan novels series, all you get is a panicky look in their eye that says. “Ah crap, I still haven’t got past page 10.” It’s like convincing someone to eat asparagus. I’ll put it on the list, they say, cosily reminding themselves they’ve got half of The Last Dance to watch before they crack on with that re-watch of Succession.
Perhaps I’m just not very persuasive, but for my lira they are missing out on the best TV drama of the past decade. I did not fall in love with it in its very first scene, in which a 60-year-old Elena “Lenu” Greco is informed that her old friend, Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, has gone missing, and decides to write Lila’s life story. It was the second scene, when the girls, as infants, first cross paths in their classroom. Lenu, the model pupil and apple of the teacher’s eye, is severely put out when it transpires that Lila, a filthy street urchin, can, precociously, read and write. More than that, she’s self-taught. From that moment on, the girls are inextricably tied together, bonded by a mutual fascination and jealousy.
An eight-part drama about academic competitiveness? No wonder people glaze over when I talk about it. But wait, there’s more. Set in the unfashionable, working-class district of Rione Luzzatti, with its squat, Brutalist, Fascist-built apartment blocks, the drama has a rare and intoxicating sense of place. The director and adapter Saverio Costanzo has made a character of the neighbourhood, with its parched, unhandsome courtyards and kissing balconies.
The cinematography, by Fabio
Cianchetti and Hélène Louvart, is stark and stunning – you wouldn’t be surprised to see Audrey Hepburn stroll around the corner (though she will almost certainly have taken a wrong turn). It’s rare to see shades of greys and browns look so vivid. It’s rare to see concrete look so beautiful. When you see a splash of real colour, it’s magnificent.
The very first episode is a remarkable and adept introduction, as we see, through Lila and Lenu’s child eyes, everything the neighbourhood has to offer, from funerals and Mafia violence to explosive extramarital affairs and, everywhere, the greying effects of poverty and corruption. We watch them grow up, grow apart, pull together, over the first series.
Series two began on Friday, with the aftermath of 16-year-old Lila’s wedding. The distance between them ebbs and flows like the tide, but they are always in each other’s shadow.
None of it would work without the impeccable casting. Margherita
Mazzucco as the “plain”, bookish Lenu, an observer of life rather than a full participant, is remarkably good, conveying crisply her concealed anger that, study as she might, she will never match Lila’s intellect. Gaia Girace gives to Lila a wonderful sense of the feral, utterly at odds with her beautiful appearance. Credit too to Elisa del Genio and Ludovica Nasti, who portrayed the girls with such insouciant grace in the opening two episodes that I initially mourned the appearance of Mazzucco and Girace in episode three.
Sublime, enriching, grown-up television drama – only Wolf Hall can touch it in recent years – that deserves to be praised from the Brutalist rooftops. Convinced?
My Brilliant Friend continues on Sky Atlantic on Friday at 9pm. All episodes are available on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV