Ferrante’s friends

Pop culture is one of the most visible ways in which we privilege romantic love over all other kinds of relationships. At any given moment in time, there are countless popular and well-crafted narratives about romantic love, in all its messy glory — books, films, fridge magnets, the works. To compare, how many contemporary accounts (across media) of a lifelong, fulfilling friendship can you think of even as you read these lines? That number is much closer to zero than you would believe.

This was one of the many compelling reasons behind the breakaway success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels — four books chronicling a lifelong friendship between Elena Greco (or ‘Lenu’, who narrates the books) and Raffaella ‘Lila’ Cerullo, two young girls growing up in 1950s Naples. A few weeks ago, a miniseries based on the first of these books ( My Brilliant Friend ) premièred on HBO. The Italian-American production is helmed by Saverio Costanzo (who previously directed the low-key brilliant In Treatment , a show that, among other things, lured Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri to television, as consultant for episodes featuring Irrfan Khan as an elderly Bengali immigrant in America).

One of the first things you notice about Costanzo’s adaptation is its keen awareness of the long game. By playing up the book’s relatively gentle foreshadowing and adding layers of portentous harmonies, courtesy composer Max Richter’s score, it is pretty much upfront about its intended status as a grand Tolstoyan tragedy. Within the first 10 minutes, there are half-a-dozen shots employing the kind of lighting and camera angles more commonly seen in horror stories or psychological thrillers. A bold choice, you’d think, for a pilot that bestows most of its screen time on a pair of first-graders.

Not quite, though. The psychological complexity of children — and the much-ignored fact that they can and often do have rich interior lives — is one of Ferrante’s calling cards as a novelist. And Costanzo smartly uses distinctly ‘grown-up’ modes of expression while introducing the two children at the heart of the story. It helps that his child actors are absolutely brilliant. Ludovica Nasti, in particular, has her task cut out for her. Nasti plays Lila, one of the great characters in contemporary literature. Aloof, almost feral when we see her at first, Lila reveals herself to be prodigiously gifted academically. She is also curious, stubborn and strong-willed in the extreme, with a pragmatic, working-class wisdom and a devastatingly dry wit to boot. It is to Nasti and Costanzo’s credit that almost all of these different sides of Lila’s character are wonderfully apparent, right from the first episode.

In a bravura scene in the first episode, we see Lila in a bit of an academic dance-off with a boy named Enzo, wherein teachers pelt both of them with maths and language problems. At first, Lila lets Enzo win, something that she also communicates to Lenu wordlessly. But soon, her intellectual pride takes over and she effortlessly crushes Enzo, much to his chagrin. Nasti has to convey all of this through her eyes, and not much else — that’s a tough nut for a child actor to crack, and her performance is astonishingly good.

Of course, even the scenes involving cutesy academic jousting do not cloak the fact that gendered violence is one of the dominant themes of the Neapolitan novels. Right after the classroom scene, we see Enzo and his friends pelting Lila with rocks; to her credit, she gives as good as she gets. In a latter, rather more troubling moment, we see Lila brutally beaten by Enzo’s adolescent brother Stefano. Even the opening credits acknowledge this subtly, through a series of traditional, heteronormative family portraits that introduce us to the various families — Grecos, Cerullos, Caraccis, Sarratores and more. In each of these portraits, the woman makes conciliatory, acquiescing faces at the camera while the man of the house maintains a fierce, forbidding countenance, as though the photographer, like the rest of the world, had done something to wound his pride. It’s the kind of small but vital detail that stays with viewers long after they’ve stopped watching.

The series has grown in confidence in the first three episodes, as though mirroring the development of the protagonists themselves. And by now, we have teenaged versions of Lila and Lenu. In the latest episode, the scene featuring Lenu’s first period is sure to be talked about for a long time. It balances horror and sensitivity very nicely indeed, never quite giving in to one or the other. Fittingly, the episode is called ‘The Metamorphoses’, after Ovid’s epic poem — which is one of the two premier examples of ‘body mutability discourse’ in high literature (the other, of course, being Kafka’s The Metamorphosis ).

A blurb on the back cover of My Brilliant Friend ’s Europa edition says: “Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea how explosive these works are”. Lila’s fierce, burning eyes in the show are as good an endorsement of this statement as any. As Ferrante wrote, “They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

Aditya Mani Jha is a commissioning editor with Penguin Random House

COMMENT NOW