An adaptation of rare brilliance
HBO’s four-season adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is an underrated masterpiece that sets new standards
By Rehana Munir
I am not ashamed that I have not read Elena Ferrante’s iconic Neapolitan quartet. And I assure you, this isn’t a mark of misguided rebellion.
It is a literary misdemeanour that has been on my mind ever since My Brilliant Friend burst onto the literary scene with its first English instalment in 2012. Hype is the enemy of enjoyment, exemplified by what was until recently termed “Twitter buzz”. And so, I delayed my reading of the novels through all the rhapsodies of praise they had earned from my brilliant friends. And then came the show in 2018; the first foreign-language series to ever premiere on HBO.
Four seasons later, in 2024, I decided it was really all right if I did not read the source material. For here is a television series that exquisitely, poignantly and faithfully captures the essence of literature. Employing traditional cinematic tools, it traverses the length of each episode and season to elevate the viewing experience. Such series are not technically termed as “films”, but this is filmmaking at its languorous best. The lack of hype around it is baffling.
Ferrante’s story about the ambiguous Lenu (Elena) and volatile Lila is now in the realm of myth. Two six-year-olds strike a deep friendship in their grotty, bombed-out, 1950s Naples neighbourhood where dangers and disasters lurk around every male-dominated corner. The friendship persists (but not without interruptions) through the rites of romance and sex, education and rebellion, marriage and motherhood, filthy factories and literary soirées.
The two girls grow into young, middle-aged and then older women, only to repeat patterns in their shared history. Sometimes, they overcome traumas with pluck and resilience. At other time, they’re unable to resist the criminal violence of the neighbourhood that stokes the demons within. They cannot be separated from each other, nor from the place they call home. The tug and pull between the protagonists and Naples is the stuff of the novel. Elena is the outwardly composed yet internally conflicted narrator – a woman writing her way into a man’s world.
On screen, the chemistry is hypnotic. The creators use Elena’s voiceover in what might seem like an obvious adaptation device. And yet, because of how nuanced and surprising the writing is, it’s not a lazy rendering. Instead, Elena’s voice infuses the complex narration with a luminous halo. And then there’s the element of music. Max Richter’s signature melody, used in the title track (Whispers), is piercing. You cannot think of the show without hearing those boldly marching strings, slowly burn into an emotional flame. You never once want to skip to the main event.
The cinematography, always in service of feeling and not empty aesthetics, is inspired. We see not just the painstakingly recreated Naples of a bygone era but are privy to the slightest of twitches and subtlest of smiles in living rooms of peeling wallpaper and sagging spirits, and kitchens where colanders are being emptied of spaghetti and hearts of empathy. The colours and textures, clotheslines and bookcases, for all their staginess, are frighteningly honest. Overall, the setting is faithful to the stories by all accounts, but the adaptation makes superb interpretive choices.
In December 2024, Netflix released the first part of its largest Latin American show, the seemingly unadaptable One Hundred Years of Solitude. Eight episodes were released in Spanish with English subtitles and featured an English dubbed version too. There are eight more that are currently in production. It looked magnificent, with a picturesque adaptation of Macondo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional Colombian town where grand themes are touched by the alchemy of his magic realist technique. But for all its triumphs, the show lacks the intimacy and nuance of the book. It wears its identity as an epic somewhat brashly, without being able to retain the interiority of its characters. My Brilliant Friend, on the other hand, achieves this fine balance in each of its four seasons.
“[Friendship] is a relationship made out of nothing, just will. It’s pure and yet dangerous. […] There are no rules in friendship,” says the Neapolitan series creator, Saverio Costanzo, in a BBC interview about the iconoclastic novels. Elsewhere in the interview he declares, “Never, not even [for] a moment, have I used any kind of trick to make things easier for viewers”.
Just a couple of months after the finale of My Brilliant Friend series on HBO, in November 2024, Payal Kapadia’s movie, All We Imagine As Light, was released in Indian theatres after a Cannes nod earlier that year. A poetically filmed story about strong female bonds against the backdrop of social class, patriarchy and urban squalor, it offers the possibility of transcendence by reimagining the idea of community.
I wonder if Ferrante and the makers of the TV series have watched this quietly luminous movie that reflects the core themes of Lila and Lenu’s world in a seemingly different yet inherently similar universe …
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