My Brilliant Friend 2018

Stunning and very engrossing 8 hour series based on the books by the secretive  and pseudonymous Elena Ferrante that should keep many of you happy and purring with delight during these hot summer months. Directed by Saverio Costanzo in Large scale emotions, narrative and design the series (subtitled) is the story of two young girls Elena and Lila who grow up in a run down post war Naples neighborhood that is more outside than inside the city. There are many characters that come and go and grow up and change before our eyes, but the two young girls first seen as adolescents and then as teenagers are the focus of the film and both of the young untrained actresses who play the girls as teens are superb. I should say they are both stunning especially Gaia Girace who should have a brilliant career in films if she chooses. You can’t take your eyes off her, she is that striking. The film of course brings to mind all the great Italian directors Fellini, Rossellini & Di Sica and so many others and is overstocked with complicated plots and colorful characters. It might be confusing at first as there is so much to take in. Both girls are brilliant students but one gives it up to work for her father who is a shoemaker and the other continues on with her studies, and both have many of the young and handsome neighborhood Italian boys and later sexy and handsome men falling in love with them, usually to no avail. Some may have a problem with the careful shabbiness of it all, it is wonderfully designed, the clothes and cars of the 50’s are especially beautiful and some may have problems with the violence, there is plenty of it. A child is thrown from a window as casual as someone flicking a cigarette, brawls erupt in the streets and in homes and shops, stones and kicks are thrown. Some of the eroticism is played out by the young men, who strut their stuff dancing and at the big Italian wedding that closes the film with each other. The film, ends rather abruptly at this wedding which promises more to come.