When Saverio Costanzo, the director of HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend,” wanted to cut the story’s final wedding scene, Elena Ferrante pushed back, saying it was the scene she initially imagined when she wrote her four-part series of Neapolitan novels, of which “My Brilliant Friend” is the first. The scene’s inclusion makes a fitting ending to a season that has not strayed far from its source material. HBO has confirmed it will air eight more episodes covering Ferrante’s second Neapolitan novel, “The Story of a New Name.”
This week’s two episodes saw Lila secure her desired engagement and Lenù get a boyfriend she cares little for. Lila advanced her plan to make and sell expensive shoes with her brother; Lenù returns from Ischia for further adventures in school. Their friendship remains complicated by jealousy and competitiveness.
This week, Eleanor Stanford and Joshua Barone, editors on the Culture desk, are joined by Parul Sehgal, a critic for the Times Book Review, who has written extensively about Ferrante’s work.
ELEANOR STANFORD: In this week’s final Season 1 episodes, I found it completely heartbreaking to watch Lila and Lenù, now 16, fight and believe they have vanquished the forces of (male) violence they face. In marrying Stefano, Lila thinks she is escaping the clutches of the Solaras. Lenù has her boyfriend Antonio warn off Donato Sarratore without having to explain that Sarratore assaulted her.
But by the end of “My Brilliant Friend,” Lila realizes Stefano will choose his business interests over promises made to her, and, well, we know from the books that Lenù hasn’t seen the last of Sarratore. Do you think this failure was inevitable? Are there just too many structural forces working against the teenagers?
PARUL SEHGAL: Teenagers — or just women, generally. I’m a slightly cranky viewer of this show, but I’ve been moved by the performances of the older women who so eloquently exude capitulation, numbness and exhaustion — the sigh of Lila’s mother (Valentina Acca) alone. In these two episodes we see the same expressions start to flicker across the faces of Lila and Lenù, themselves. They’re learning defeat.
JOSHUA BARONE: That look on their teary-eyed faces in the season’s final moments is one of Costanzo’s great triumphs of the series. There is no voice-over or even dialogue, yet he clearly articulates what feels like an entire conversation about defeat and despair.
I wrote at the beginning of the season that I hoped for an adaptation that was spiritually faithful to Ferrante, yet unique to the medium of TV. Can we safely say now that Costanzo has delivered on this?
STANFORD: I think so. One plot quibble I have in these later episodes is the absence of Lenù's sexual relationship with Antonio. In the book, their secretive evening rendezvous in the neighborhood garden became an important piece in the puzzle of Lenù's sexuality. I wonder if the explicit scenes weren’t included in part because of the youth of Margherita Mazzucco, the actress playing Lenù, but I think we will miss that context as the character’s writing becomes centered around female sexuality later in the story. But in tone and atmosphere, I do agree that Costanzo has remained true to his source.
BARONE: There is also the subtle way he broadcasts the story as memory: early childhood shown as gray, flat and almost fuzzy, and adolescence giving way to brighter hues that reach their apotheosis with Lenù blossoming on the island of Ischia. But it’s also fascinating to hear when characters switch between Italian and dialect, choices with rich social and political implications.
Above all, though, Costanzo deftly embeds homages to the canon of Italian cinema in the stories of Lila and Lenù. Especially in the early episodes, he directs with a neorealist’s touch, conjuring the untrained-actor atmosphere of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini — the kings of film in postwar Italy, the precise milieu of “My Brilliant Friend.” This show, like the novel, is uniquely, declaratively Italian.
SEHGAL: I’m going to give full rein to my crabbiness; why fight it — who am I, Nunzia Cerullo?
There’s a lovely, very intimate scene in the final episode, when Lila is picking out wedding dresses with Lenù's help. She tells Lenù that the difference between them is that Lenù is good at making people like her while she (Lila) frightens them.
To me, the Neapolitan novels are a Lila. They’re claustrophobic, scary and ambiguous. The television show is a Lenù. It’s very pretty and wants to be pleasing. Even the violence feels stylized. It leaves out so much of what gives the book its allure — how Ferrante depicts emotions and desires that are conflicted and competing and don’t really have a name. The bathing scene, for example, is one of the most charged scenes in the series. In the book, Lenù bathes Lila before her wedding and is overcome by — what? There’s no one word for it, so let me just quote the sentence: “the violent emotion that overwhelms you, so that it forces you to stay, to rest your gaze on the childish shoulders, on the breasts and stiffly cold nipples, on the narrow hips and the tense buttocks, on the black sex, on the long legs, on the tender knees, on the curved ankles, on the elegant feet; and to act as if it’s nothing when instead everything is there.” The show leaves it out entirely. And, as Eleanor mentioned in an earlier discussion, the show never finds a satisfactory way to hint that Lenù might be a wildly unreliable narrator. These kinds of complexities and ambiguities were the Neapolitan novels for me. I miss them.
But if the essence of the books is lacking for me, the details, as Josh points out, are handled with scrupulous attention. Not one wrong note.
STANFORD: Oh, the show is totally a Lenù. My affection for it is probably evidence I have more Lenù in me than I’d like to admit, to return to Alicia’s closing question from our second conversation.
BARONE: I do think the ambiguous allure of the novels comes through in the series, though it’s often unspoken. The camera lingers on faces, especially those of Lila and Lenù; rarely are their expressions clear or consistent. They’re more likely to contradict the tone of a scene, as in the finale’s wedding.
Lila’s eyes reveal a mercurial mind at work. They can, in a single moment, convey warmth, anger and curiosity — sometimes one after another, sometimes all at once. And in Lenù I see Ferrante’s prose: attempting to figure out the world around her, trying to reconcile desire and reason, loving her best friend while fighting back envy and searching for little victories where she can find them.
SEHGAL: I saw stirrings of what you describe in the child Lila and Lenù — what extraordinary, mysterious performances by Ludovica Nasti and Elisa Del Genio. But I found Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco (the teenage Lila and Lenù) vacant in comparison. And I tired of the ponderous silences and opaque “meaningful” glances. Girace even looked plain unsure at times. But Ferrante long anticipated my frustration: “No form could ever contain Lila.”
STANFORD: After I finished the season I went back and re-watched a couple of the episodes with the child actresses and realized I had missed them. It’s their imagery and performances that will stay lodged in my mind, I think: the sweetly bleak shot of them wrapped around each other reading “Little Women;” their little bodies standing outside Don Achille’s door; Lila flying through the window, thrown by her father. The world created by the show does feel more unequivocal than Ferrante’s, missing the tantalizing unpredictability of an unreliable literary narrator. But the girls’ performances added some new shades to the story that I really loved.
I suppose the last question to ask you both is whether you will join me in watching the next season, which will adapt the second novel, “The Story of a New Name”?
SEHGAL: I’m out! Shocking, I know. But I look forward to glutting myself on the novels again soon. I take with me the superb supporting performances that sustained the show — Eduardo Scarpetta as the lovelorn Pasquale and Dora Romano as the fierce Maestra Oliviero, to name just two.
But even I will say that the final episode beautifully sets up the seasons to come, as the girls are drawn in different directions: Lila, deeper into the neighborhood’s ancient enmities; Lenù, to freedom. It’s very smartly staged. Lenù flees her friend’s wedding, sees a threat to Lila and races back to help her. In a matter of seconds, we see the book’s great theme: the conflict that can exist between loyalty to others and self-preservation. (My own struggle where our watching group was concerned!)
BARONE: Watching the series has led me back to Ferrante. Little can compare with her writing, which continues to astonish from sentence to sentence. But I have tried to accept the show on its own terms; as I think is clear from our discussions, there is a lot to love independently of the Neapolitan novels. At any rate, this adaptation hasn’t been a failure, and how can I stay away when the next two seasons will be based on “The Story of a New Name,” and “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” two of the best books in Ferrante’s entire output?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.