Watch it without distraction, con tutto il cuor, with your full heart. Here in My Brilliant Friend are the Elena and Lila we may know from the books, or that viewers will meet for the first time through this series. As teenagers, Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace find that awkward, proud urgency in every living moment while still being distracted by their own dreams of a womanhood far removed from the reality of their mothers and classmates.
The crowded homes, cramped and musty, filled with generations of extended families, are all the children know.Įlisa del Genio and Ludovica Nasti portray Elena and Lila as children, and they are bewitching in their intensity and obsessive attachment to one another. There is none of the sanctimonious sympathy for the city and citizens living in poverty that might alienate viewers from the Naples that Lila and Elena know as home. Over eight episodes of season 1, My Brilliant Friend demands your full attention and, if provided, it will duly reward you.Ĭreator and director Saverio Costanzo infuses the series with the sounds, smells, sights and scenarios so tenderly described in the book. My Brilliant Friend, published in 2012, was the first of her novels to be translated to a television series – now in its third season – following a couple of movie adaptations, Troubling Love in 1995 and The Days of Abandonment in 2005.įor those who were captivated by Elena and Lila, childhood friends raised in Naples during the post-War 1950s, the prospect of actors portraying the characters who Ferrante had generously allowed us to imagine was a fearsome one. The mysterious Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym) succeeded, concentrating the paradoxes of female friendships into words in her internationally renowned Neapolitan novels. Lila (Ludovica Nasti) and Elena (Elisa del Genio) in ‘My Brilliant Friend’.Ĭapturing women’s friendships – loving, manipulative, possessive, supportive and layered with all our individual agendas and perceptions – in something as limited as language is akin to scooping the ocean into a teacup.
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