Writers like Elena Ferrante are putting the pain of teenage girls centre stage
Iseem to have spent much of the lockdown inside the minds of teenagers. Two of the books that I have been able to finish, despite having difficulty concentrating, have been coming-of-age stories about teenage girls, by Annie Ernaux and Elena Ferrante. Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story, published by Fitzcarraldo, fills a lacuna in the French author’s ongoing multiple-memoir project, telling of an early, traumatic sexual experience in 1958 that has taken her six decades to write about. Ferrante’s forthcoming The Lying Life of Adults (Europa Editions) tells of Giovanna, a teenage Neapolitan girl torn between two very different cities as she explores her sexuality and tries to construct an identity for herself.
Our appetite for teenage stories shows no sign of abating. Netflix Italia has just announced plans to turn The Lying Life of Adults into a series, while the small-screen adaptation of Normal People has seen more than 16.2m viewing requests and delivered BBC Three’s best ever week. As a novel, Normal People has been disparaged in some quarters as YA (young adult) fiction with pretensions, but regardless of whether you are a fan or not, its treatment of formative teenage experience and emotions as serious and worthy of attention is meaningful, unusual even. It’s odd that this should feel exceptional, considering how the coming-ofage novel is such an established literary tradition, from Bonjour Tristesse to The Bell Jar to The Catcher in the Rye. Yet somewhere along the way, readers seem to have stopped taking teenagers seriously.
We’ve all been guilty of dismissing our teenage experiences, even being unkind to our teenage selves. The sexual experiences we have in those years are in many ways formative, but many of us write them off as clumsy and fumbling, minimising what they meant to us at the time – which was often everything. Our memories of our youth are potent and remain so throughout our lives. As the young journalist James Marriott wrote recently: “Life touches us more closely when we’re young – it’s like missing a layer of skin. Experiences and feelings are painful and vivid in a way they never will be again as, agonisingly, we become ourselves.”
I think we are mean to our teenage selves because, on some level, we are embarrassed about how deeply we felt things at that age. Adulthood levels us out, makes us cynical, gives us distance from the things that hurt us. As a girl, particularly, you spend your adolescence discovering all the ways in which the world wants to hurt you, that your sexuality is not your own, that others feel a degree of ownership of your body to which they should not be entitled. For too many girls that discovery is painful, even traumatic. Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other is another brilliant recent novel that offers vivid insight into what it means to inhabit a teenage body, in this case a black teenage body that is forced to endure the horror of rape.
There is a tendency to distance ourselves from the traumas of youth because we don’t want these traumas to define us as adults. It’s telling that it took Ernaux 60 years to tell the story of that sexual experience and the grey area she feels it occupies. The telling of it now has dovetailed with the #MeToo movement, of which she is supportive, which has seen many women reappraise their teenage years. Ernaux told the New York Times that “had it been a rape, I might have been able to talk about it earlier, but I never thought about it in that way”. Many women are only just finding – or inventing – the language they need to tell their stories.
Watching Portrait of a Lady on Fire recently, which is directed by Céline Sciamma, another great chronicler of teenage femininity, I was struck by a scene in which two young women recreate an abortion, while a third – the artist – draws it (this is in late 18th-century France). It moved me greatly because of what it told the viewer about that which is undocumented. All those centuries of frightened women bleeding and cramping, and not one painting. When it comes to our cultural understanding of femininity, there are still many dark patches where there should be light.
Both Ferrante and Ernaux are of a generation whose understanding of teenage sexuality was shaped by the repressed postwar period in which they came of age. As a reader, I was left with deep feelings of sadness and sympathy for the young women in their books. I felt their struggles so powerfully, and they were so well rendered, that the behaviour of these girls, which could easily be dismissed as “teenage” from the outside, made perfect, logical sense. Of course they felt that way. Perhaps the more we’re exposed to teenage narratives that make such a persuasive case for their place in the arts, and that assert themselves as worthy of serious literary and cinematic inquiry, the more we will start to extend that sympathy to our own teenage selves and remember what it was like to feel everything so fiercely and so deeply.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
and based on a real case. Hardy plays Leo Demidov, the soldier who hoisted the Red Flag atop the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945 and went on to become a security officer. He’s on the trail of a serial killer, but hated by the regime for his tough refusal to denounce his wife on a trumped-up charge. It’s a heavy meal of a film, but Hardy brings to it an actorly muscle-mass.
15. The Reckoning (2002)
Hardy took a walk on the wild side and was sufficiently confident in his own resounding masculinity to play a very gender-challenging character in this weird film set in the 14th century. It features a strolling troupe of players led by Willem Dafoe; one of them is Straw, played by Hardy, who specialises in cross-dressing and applying lipstick with dainty precision before going out on stage.
14. Lawless (2012)
Hardy isn’t especially known for patterned knitwear but maybe he should be, considering his woolly attire in this gonzo-violent Prohibition-era mob drama. He plays the deadpan Forrest Bondurant, a hooch runner in Virginia whose jumper really needs a handwash. His brother is Howard, played by Jason Clarke, and there’s a nervy younger brother, Jack, played by Shia LaBeouf. Hardy’s slow-moving, cool presence gives the film some ballast.
13. Warrior (2011)
This was a film widely considered in its day to have brought the smackdown and delivered the action wowsers. Hardy plays Tommy, an Iraq war veteran returning home to Philadelphia to settle the score with his boozy, bullying dad, Paddy, played by Nick Nolte. The father contritely agrees to coach Tommy in his career as an MMA fighter, but Tommy’s opponent turns out to be his equally tightly wound brother Brendan, played by Joel Edgerton. It’s bythe-numbers stuff, but Hardy is simmeringly charismatic.
12. Dunkirk (2017)
This is just a returning cameo, but what a cameo and what a film, from a director who gave Hardy some his best roles. The scene is the victory-fromdefeat miracle of Dunkirk, when thousands of stranded British soldiers were rescued from the beaches of northern France with the aid of a plucky flotilla of small boats. Hardy plays Farrier, the lone RAF pilot who engages the enemy overhead at almost suicidal risk: it’s a role supercharged with significance considering how much the RAF was resented for a perceived failure to provide sufficient air cover during the evacuation.
11. Capone (2020)
A very strange but arresting performance from Hardy as the prematurely ageing Al Capone, under house arrest in Florida in the last year of his life, suffering from dementia and syphilis, starting to hallucinate and displaying an unfortunate habit of soiling himself in moments of stress. Hardy growls and rasps his insults in Italian and English.
10. Bronson (2008)
Many Hardy connoisseurs believe that it was this film, from the Danish provocateur Nicolas Winding Refn, that really propelled the actor into the big league. Crucially, he gained 100lbs (which meant he had a new Russell Crowe-type beefiness and solidity) to play the notorious British prisoner Charles Bronson (a self-given name, having been born Michael Peterson), a lifer whose bizarre delusions and propensity for violence in jail has kept him banged up for the past three decades. Bronson addresses the audience directly, like a droll and dapper music hall turn. It’s a strange film, but a strong performance from Hardy.
9. Legend (2015)
Playing twins is a test for any actor, and Hardy tackles it with gusto in this dual role that he was surely born to play – Reggie and Ronnie Kray, the hideous cockney siblings who ruled East End gangland in the 1960s. Reggie is the supposedly more rational one, although without glasses, and Ronnie is barking mad, with glasses, and a tiny bit more weight. Hardy’s Ronnie has a perpetual pop-eyed stare of psychopathic disapproval, insisting on his own gayness in a growling voice, like a scary Tommy Cooper. Reggie, in all his comparative normality, is closer to being the film’s romantic lead.
8. London Road (2015)
This excellent, undervalued film from Rufus Norris was one of the most startling cinema experiences of the past decade: a movie opera based on the Ipswich serial killer case of 2006, in a reportage verbatim style, taken from eyewitness accounts – based on the stage play at London’s National Theatre. Hardy plays Mark, a minicab driver who has a choric function, singing about his own expertise on the subject of psychopathic homicide. He says defensively: “I’ve studied serial killers; it doesn’t mean I am one.” (But there is a worrying pause before the phrase: “I am one.”) It’s the nearest Hardy has come to Travis Bickle.
7. Inception (2010)
In Nolan’s dizzyingly hi-tech, highconcept cerebral thriller, Hardy plays one of a crew run by Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an industrial espionage hacker whose speciality is to invade people’s subconscious in order to steal their commercially sensitive secrets. Or, in this case, to mastermind the implanting (or inception) of an idea that will break up a business empire. Hardy is Cobb’s man Eames, whose speciality is shape-shifting identity theft, a skill that is very helpful in manipulating the enemy. It’s a posher, smoother and more sinuous role than we have come to expect from Hardy, and Nolan’s film brings out all the actor’s latent style and menace.
6. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
This was another of the heavyhitter roles that put Hardy on the map in a big way. In the third and final of Nolan’s Dark Knight movies, Hardy plays the mighty and merciless Bane, who squares off with Batman. Bane is a man masked with a heavy leather respirator to hide an awful disfigurement and he is the leader of an underground army of the disaffected. Most perplexingly, he speaks rather indistinctly through his mask and you often have to concentrate very hard to work out what he is saying. He sounds like Darth Vader shouting, while playing the bass accordion through a Harley Davidson exhaust pipe. But Hardy never gives it less than 100%.
5. The Revenant (2015)
This was probably the most purely and successfully villainous role of
Hardy’s career, although he might as easily have been cast in the lead. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the real-life 19thcentury frontiersman Hugh Glass, who was part of an expeditionary forceto establish a fur-trapping base in Missouri. Hardy’s John Fitzgerald is one of the shifty men working alongside him who abandons Glass to his doom after the group is set upon by a warrior tribe, and later claims extra pay for having supposedly given him a Christian burial. But Glass is still alive, survives against terrible odds, and comes for payback. In a way, Hardy is there to embody all that DiCaprio’s character is fighting against: he has to be a worthy alpha-adversary, not simply mean and duplicitous. His gloweringly malign presence bookends the movie at the beginning and end – we are heading for a mighty confrontation.
4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
John Le Carré’s intelligence thrillers are a far cry from the romanticised fantasies of James Bond. His is a world of dull chaps in dull suits trying not to think about shabby, shame-filled compromises and betrayals. But in this excellent version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Hardy’s character Ricki Tarr is the nearest thing the drama has to a 007 figure, surrounded by Ms and Qs. He’s a young, physically fit spy who has a bit of derring-do and womanising in his life, dramatically reporting back to Gary Oldman’s Smiley from his posting in Istanbul. He is not posh like the others, and he wears a sheepskin jacket, racy denim shirt – and Hardy also has a reddish-blond wig for the role. The getup is borderline absurd, perhaps, but Hardy carries it off and it is entirely consistent with the period. Smartened up, Hardy will make an excellent Bond.
3. The Drop (2014)
Of all the leading movie roles Hardy has had, this is probably the most conventionally sympathetic and heroic. In a Boston crime drama that is adapted from a story by Dennis Lehane, Hardy plays a nice, ordinary guy called Bob, who works in a bar owned by his glowering cousin Marv (James Gandolfini). The place is used as a drop point by Chechen gangsters for their illegal cash. Bob rescues a puppy from a trash-can nearby and this quaint act of altruism and innocence sets in train a series of dramatic and tragic events. Bob is a unique figure in Hardy’s CV: he is basically likable and relatable, and Hardy’s face and style have always resisted this kind of ingratiation. His character is also quite vulnerable, being bullied by a local cop and accused by him of letting down the church. The Drop is, in many ways, an outlier for Hardy, but it could point the way ahead for his future career.
2. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
For the majority of his fanbase, this is probably the key Hardy movie: George Miller’s widely adored reboot of his Mad Max franchise – a bizarre convoy-chase action fantasia in the post-apocalyptic Australian desert, where a warlord controls oil, water, bullets and milk. Hardy plays the taciturn Max Rockatansky (approximately the character played by Mel Gibson in the original), a former interceptor lawman and now a lone wolf, tormented by memories of the wife and child he couldn’t save. He is captured by a hateful chieftain and taken to his stronghold from which he escapes in the company of the charismatic Charlize Theron. She is is to lead a feminist fightback against the misogynist tyranny that keeps the women oppressed, like farm animals, and she is to make common cause with Max. It is almost a silent movie role for Hardy, but his potent, bullish, violent presence and fierce face – rugged, yet sensually fulllipped – make him a living cartoon of rage in the desert sun.
1. Locke (2013)
This is Hardy’s finest hour, a film that shows what he really can do as an actor, when all the films that had made him famous seemed to have been suppressing the very qualities of subtlety and sensitivity that he shows here. Hardy plays British construction manager Ivan Locke, and the entire film is simply a shot of him at the wheel of his car, like a dashcam, as he talks to the people who are important in his life on his hands-free mobile. He is a dependable, professional, unemotional bloke who had been about to supervise the pouring of thousands of tonnes of wet cement into the foundations of new building in the Midlands. But just when he is needed there in person, Locke has abandoned the site and is driving south to London. He is having a marital crisis and an emotional breakdown, but he is keeping it together; Hardy’s outstanding less-is-more acting shows the awful damage that this is inflicting on him personally. It is a vocal and physical performance that could be compared to Richard Burton, but is entirely distinctive personal work. This is top Hardy.