My
Brilliant Friend (Italian: L'amica geniale) is an Italian- and
Neapolitan-language coming-of-age drama television series created by Saverio
Costanzo for HBO, RAI and TIMvision. Named after the first of four novels in
the Neapolitan Novels series by Elena Ferrante, it is set to adapt the entire
literary work over four eight-episode seasons. The series is a co-production
between Italian production companies Wildside, Fandango, The Apartment, Mowe
and international film group Umedia.
The first
season premiered on HBO on November 18, 2018 and on Rai 1 and TIMvision on
November 27, 2018. A second season, based on Ferrante's second Neapolitan Novel
and titled My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name (Italian: L'amica
geniale - Storia del nuovo cognome), was confirmed in December 2018, and
premiered on Rai 1 on February 10, 2020, and on HBO on March 16, 2020. The
first two episodes of the second season were released in Italian cinemas from
January 27 to 29, 2020.
On April
30, 2020, the series was renewed for a third season, to be based on the third
novel in the series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.
My Brilliant Friend review – sink into a slice of this
Neapolitan delight
5 / 5
stars5 out of 5 stars.
Gripping, heartbreaking, and beautiful, the second
series of the gorgeous Elena Ferrante adaptation shows no signs of slacking
Rebecca
Nicholson
Fri 19 Jun
2020 22.10 BSTLast modified on Sat 20 Jun 2020 20.59 BST
My
Brilliant Friend (Sky Atlantic) never quite had the breakout moment that a
series of its quality deserved. Perhaps this second series will bring it the
audience to match the acclaim. The beautiful and graceful adaptation of Elena
Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels moves to book two, The Story of a New Name, and
picks up on the evening of Lila’s wedding to the vile Stefano, precisely where
season one left off.
Its debut
season managed to take elements that are usually signs of, if not a dud, then a
slog – the risk of adapting beloved novels, child actors, a voiceover narrating
the story, trying to make writing appear interesting on screen – and made all
of them sing. It shows no sign of slacking as it moves into the 1950s.
For Lila,
marriage is a direct root out of poverty, but her husband has betrayed her
before they have even left for the honeymoon, and their trip to the Amalfi
coast is far from the celebration is should be. It descends, quickly and
inevitably, into shocking, horrifying violence. When Lila returns home, she
finds that she may have escaped her old impoverished neighbourhood and moved
into a nicer one, but the trappings are the same as they are for most wives of
her era and environment. She simply has bigger rooms and more trinkets. To see
Lila stuck in a domestic no man’s land, her spirit sapped away, is
heartbreaking.
Her
brilliant friend Lenù, meanwhile, is continuing along her own, slower, path to
escape, pursuing the education that Lila was denied. When Lenù starts to doubt
her ability to see her schooling through to the end, owing to a crisis of
confidence and the distractions of romantic entanglements, it feels like a
double betrayal, because she is learning for the two of them. Yet Lenù is
sympathetic, her choices understandable. She tries to force herself to care
about Antonio, the local boy who wants to marry her, as her way of tethering
herself to her old neighbourhood. But he is unable to trust her, or rather, his
insecurities make him uneasy, because she is educated and he is not. She wants
to love him because he is safe, unlike the lofty and aloof Nino, who wears
glasses, prints his own magazine and talks about workers’ rights.
The two
girls had drifted apart by the end of season one, divided by unavoidable
resentments and differing circumstances, but here they are back together,
working out how each of them can make their way through their lives as young
women.
My
Brilliant Friend is excellent on the complicated nature of female friendships
and how they can turn on competition and admiration, particularly when the
playing field is not level and never will be. As smart teenage girls in a
society that has little need for them, the odds are almost always stacked
against them. They are hungry for experience but, at 16, Lila has a violent
husband who repulses her. There is a shot of Stefano eating prawns and sloshing
back wine that hammers home his grotesqueness, and it reminded me of Tony
Soprano at his most gluttonous. In grown-up dresses that drown her frame, she
looks 20 years older than she is, wandering around her showroom of a home. The
leads, Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco, are both remarkable, not least
because they appear to be the same age as their characters, and have a lot of
weight to carry.
When
Stefano brings Lila back from their honeymoon, she is forced to sit down with
her family, her face black and blue. She sits there as if daring them to ask.
They all awkwardly ignore the bruises until, eventually, a friend walks in and
is shocked enough to mention it without thought. She tells them she fell on the
rocks, and the terrible relief is palpable: they know she’s lying, but this way
they won’t have to confront it. Later, when she tells Lenù what happened, a
tear slowly drips down her friend’s face. But the empathy seems to revive Lila,
and rekindle some of what has been taken away. At the end of the opening
episode, she seems ready to fight again.
Most big
television shows are gorgeous now, thanks to a combination of technical
advancement, the seemingly bottomless pot of money and the fact that, since TV
is now considered cinematic, dominated by Hollywood stars, it really needs to
look the part. But even by those standards, My Brilliant Friend is an
exceptionally gorgeous show.
It takes
its time when it needs to and zips through the parts where it does not need to
linger. (I am ambivalent only about the depiction of a rape, which is part of
the story, but the scene goes on too long, and seems unnecessarily cruel in its
detail.) My Brilliant Friend is absorbing, gripping television that demands
that you sink into it completely, closing off all distractions.
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