TV Review: My Brilliant Friend will stand the test of time — there isn't a better show out there right now
My Brilliant Friend is based on the best-selling novel by Elena Ferrante. Pictures: Eduardo Castaldo
I doubt there's a better show out right now than ( Sky Atlantic and the Now TV app.) The third series just dropped and it still feels as fresh and spiky as ever.
Quick recap in case you missed it up to now. is adapted from the hit novels by an Italian writer who goes by the name, Elena Ferrante. It’s about the friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, who grow up together in a tough suburb of 1950s Naples. Elena breaks out after a fashion, goes to university and writes a popular novel; Lila, ferocious and bright, marries a local hood and ends up working in a sausage factory. They are still tight, even though Lila made off with Nino, the love of Elena’s life.
That’s where we’re at for the start of Season 3. It’s the early 70s, Elena is unhappily engaged to an intellectual called Pietro. Shunned at home for having notions, she’s a bit lost, navigating grabby male hands in the literary and artistic world. Lila has a breakdown after facing down the creepy boss of her sausage factory. It’s Elena and Nino against the world.
This is the beauty of this show. They are outsiders wherever they go, sharing more in common with each other than friends and love r s in their separate worlds. The acting by Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco is spell-binding. You just get wrapped up in .
It helps that Italians have amazing faces. I’ve noticed this before with shows like — Italian TV is visually compelling because Italians have brilliant faces. It must have something to do with a peninsula that has been a crossroads for scores of civilisations over thousands of years.
I see something different in soft and vicious Mafia guy, Michele or chisel-faced Communist, Pasquale in every second scene. Elena’s mother has this bonkers ability to convey about three emotions at once. It just adds to it that her name is .
Everything just feels right in this production. Season 3 is very brown and 1970s, it’s like being there. If this makes the show sound overly arty, it isn’t. There is plenty of page-turning intrigue and twisting in it, as you’d expect from a show based on a series of best-selling novels.
But in the end, it all comes back to Elena and Lila. There is a credible bond between the two characters, despite the fact they have plenty of reasons on both sides to hate each other. (Lila is the brighter of the two, but Elena got away.)
There are loads of meaty background observations on class and sexism, but none of these get in the way of the story.
I watched recently, 50 years after it was released. It feels as good as ever.
will also stand the test of time. It has the same care in terms of mood and tension. It has subtitles of course, but you won’t notice them. There’s too much else to enjoy.
