Elisa del Genio, left, and Ludovica Nasti, right, in My Brilliant Friend.
It is not a matter of life and death, as so much TV drama is. It is a matter of life as it is lived fully, expansively. It is a matter of life observed from youth amid constricting social conventions and then transcended through imagination and love.
But, as often in such stories, there is the matter of how a life is first forged in those cramped surroundings of youth. In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, main character Stephen says, “When the soul of a man is born ... there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
The story told in My Brilliant Friend (Sunday, HBO, 9 p.m.) is about the restraining nets of childhood and social background. It is about what happens later, when the nets are flung away. The eight-episode adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s book – in Italian with English subtitles – is about all that. It is brilliantly done. In due course, when the best TV of this year is summarized, this series will undoubtedly be at or near the top on many lists. And deservedly so. So many scenes and emotional pinpoints have a lasting impact.
The series is a fairly honest adaptation of the book and thus is about the long and complicated friendship between two women, Lila and Lenu, starting in their childhood in the post-war slums of a town near Naples.
Lenu (as a little girl played by Elisa del Genio, then as a teenager by Margherita Mazzucco) is quiet, clever, studious and looks upon the tiny world around her with grave interest. From a first meeting in a school room she is a little wary of, but awed by, Lila (played first by Ludovica Nasti, then later by Gaia Girace). For Lenu, Lila is confounding. She has an intuitive grace and a genius for learning. She has confidence that comes from an innate sense of her own purpose. She is more quick-witted than the other children. While the other girls strive to conform to conventional ideals in order to be found pretty, she knows she looks different, intriguing and alluring. As they go on and mature (both the child actors and others are exquisitely good here) Lenu comes to realize that she is a lesser person when separated from her friend. Lila is, in a literal sense, a force of nature that changes people and places.
One of the truly great aspects of the adaptation is the treatment of place. The teeming slum buildings are their own universe, and nothing depicted is cloaked in some gauze of nostalgia. There is poverty evident; there is great hatred and little room for compassion or regret. A brawl can erupt when a woman shouts from a balcony insulting some other woman about her husband’s womanizing. There are thugs and there is violence. There is the naked need to survive and the need means that, for young women, education should cease and wages must be earned. These are the nets of acquiescence that must be escaped. Sometimes through the life of the mind and sometimes with the physical force of rebellion.
The TV adaptation (directed by Saverio Costanzo, who wrote it with Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paolucci and Elena Ferrante herself) is rich with visual oomph and simultaneously subtle in its depiction of a child’s view of the community that nurtures it. The locals who surround the two girls are reactionary and penny-pinching, but understood for what they are and neither sentimentalized or condemned. For this to succeed a particularly subdued but knowing tone is required and the adaptation achieves that with aplomb.
This is a series to embrace, to be involved with on a level that few dramas achieve. It is about personal responsibility and freedom from history but presented as a story of two lives, intertwined, and the ups and downs of a power dynamic that draws two women together, irrevocably. There are scenes – including an early one in which the duo visit the seaside for the first time – that will stay with you for a very long time. It is essential viewing.
James Joyce fled those nets and was haunted and preyed upon to the end of his days by the sights, sound and smells of what he had fled. He made art from that, as happens with My Brilliant Friend.
Also airing this weekend – My Piece of the City (Saturday, CBC 1 p.m. on Absolutely Canadian) is a gem of a film that teases out the texture of one Toronto neighbourhood. Filmmaker Moze Mossanen (who also made the wonderful You Are Here, available on HBO Canada on-demand) concentrates on the young artists of Regent Park who are chronicling the rise, fall and re-creation of their once-notorious community. With music and great archival footage, it’s masterfully made and a delight to see.
Editor’s note: (Nov. 19, 2018) An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Elena Ferrante's name. This version has been updated.