Passing the Bechdel Test with Ease

I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, both as it concerns individual lives and the life of generations. Searching to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles. —Elena Ferrante

My Brilliant Friend (L’amica genial) is the initial eight-episode miniseries in a planned thirty-two-part production of The Neapolitan Novels, a quartet of books written by the enigmatic Italian writer Elena Ferrante and translated into English by Ann Goldstein. It is a co-production between American cable network HBO and Italian networks RAI and TIMvision.

I say enigmatic because, despite having sold over 10 million copies of the books in forty countries, the author’s true identity remains unknown. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, and she defends her right to anonymity as one of the keys to her method.

Ferrante’s own description of Lila, by the elder narrator (also named Elena), in the very first chapter of the opening novel, could be autobiographical:

She wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.

My Brilliant Friend and Ferrante’s other three Neapolitan novels are set against a backdrop of six decades of upheaval in post-war Italy, including the rise of the gangster-economy in Naples and the approaching sexual revolution. It is an epic coming-of-age story (or bildungsroman) of two young friends and the members of nine interlocking families in their poor and violent village—the Cerullos, the Grecos, the Carraccis, the Pelusos, the Cappuccios, the Sarratores, the Scannos, the Solaras and the Spagnuolos.

The story is told in the form of a narrative flashback by the elder Elena Greco and begins in 2010 when sixty-year-old Elena, a successful writer, receives a phone call from her childhood friend Lila’s son, Rino, worried that his mother has disappeared. Elena and Lila went their separate ways long ago but she reassures him that this disappearance was undoubtedly a conscious decision by his mother, who always said when she was young that she might to do this some day. As she recalls her old friend, Elena begins to write down everything she can remember about their childhood together and we are transported back to 1950s Naples.

Both girls attend elementary school and are encouraged by their spinster teacher, Maestra Oliviero, to pursue higher learning and rise above their common status. She tells them, “If one wishes to remain a plebeian, he, his children, the children of his children, deserve nothing.”

Elena is bright and hard-working, but for Lila learning is effortless. She is a prodigy who, by first grade, has already taught herself to read and write. Elena’s father, against the wishes of her mother, and with the encouragement of Maestra Oliviero, agrees for his daughter to pursue higher middle school education in Ischia, but Lila’s more traditional father refuses to pay for any more schooling, especially for girls, insisting instead that she go to work, with her brother Rino, in the family shoe shop.

Elena and Lila’s relationship is a complex blend of love, envy, generosity and rivalry. Elena progresses through middle school to higher school, while Lila continues to educate herself at home. Applying her natural genius to her father’s business, Lila designs the prototype for a new kind of shoe that she believes will make them rich. She is also growing into a stunning young woman and becomes the object of the attention of the males in her village, especially Marcello Solara, the son of the head of the local Camorra. Lila refuses his advances, preferring Stefano Caracci, whose father runs the local grocery and who agrees, as part of their marriage arrangement, to finance Lila’s father’s shoe business. When she turns sixteen they marry, but Stefano breaks his word to Lila by extending an invitation to the dangerous Solara family, and her rejected suitor Marcello, who arrives at the reception wearing Lila’s artisan shoes.

Like the piano in Jane Campion’s film The Piano and the floating glass cathedral in Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, the stylish shoes that Lila has designed, after abandoning her dreams of higher education, become the central metaphor of the first series. Ferrante writes: “She was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being all her own, that was still obscure to her.” 

My Brilliant Friend was first adapted for the stage by April De Angelis, and directed by Melly Still, with a premiere in 2017 at the Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames, presented as a five-hour, two-part production. It received consistently enthusiastic reviews, the Observer writing, “Intensity wins through … as if Ferrante has materialised in front of us.”

The television series was directed by the Italian director Saverio Costanzo, who won the Best Director award at the 2014 Venice International Film Festival for Hungry Hearts. The script was co-written by Laura Paolucci and Francesco Piccolo, e-mailing suggestions back and forth to Ferrante, who also continued to help during the filming, contributing extra dialogue.

Could a television adaptation, directed by a man, possibly capture the heart of the books? In fact Costanzo, raised in a family surrounded by women, was Ferrante’s own choice, and he considers her particularly adept at unravelling what he refers to as “feminine taboos”. He commented on her descriptions of the interior life of women:

It’s as big as a universe! So I saw myself floating in this enormous universe, saying, “I don’t know anything about life. My understanding is so limited compared to theirs.”

The music was composed by post-minimalist German-born British composer Max Richter, who has worked extensively in opera and for the stage. He wrote the sixteenth-century-style music for the 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots and composed an avant-garde score for the ballet Woolf Works, based on three books by Virginia Woolf—a melange of classical music and sound composition intertwined with Virginia Woolf’s actual voice recordings.

At first you hardly notice the music in My Brilliant Friend, as it seamlessly entwines around the story. On closer listening, however, there is a sharp distinction between ambient soundscapes, which Richter excels at, and melodic compositional themes, which are slightly predictable and mechanical. But the score suits the drama and doesn’t distract from the sensitivity of the drama. The music falls somewhere between Philip Glass (without his insistent repetitive minimalism) and Michael Nyman (without Nyman’s simple and memorable melodic ideas).

Katherine Bromwich of the Guardian observed the shooting of the series in Naples:

The scale of the project is staggering. It is one of the largest sets in Europe, spreading over two hectares. An enormous warehouse contains re-creations of several characters’ apartments; all windows, doors and furniture are period originals … Ludovica Nasti, who plays the strong-willed [younger] Lila, strides around fearlessly, introducing herself to the assembled journalists … She says her favourite scenes were throwing rocks at boys and the argument with her father in which he throws her out of a window … She is a child model and points out she is from Pozzuoli, just outside Naples, “like Sophia Loren”.

The combination of fragility and remarkable strength that Nasti brings to the role of the young Lila comes in part from her real struggle, and victory, over leukaemia, for most of her twelve-year-old life. When informed by the director that she would have to have a 1950s-style bob for the film, she replied: “I got mad … I’ve been bald for a long time and finally I had long hair.”

Executive producers Paolo Sorrentino and Jennifer Schuur auditioned 9000 girls for the parts of Lila and Elena who could speak the Neapolitan dialect (even many Italians will need subtitles to understand it) but also looking for “classical” faces. The four main actors who were chosen (two for the girls as children, and two when they were teens) had no previous acting experience.

The television adaptation is mostly faithful to the novel, but where the first series concludes with Elena returning to support Lila at her disastrous wedding reception, the first book closes slightly differently: with Lila simply staring in shock at the shoes, which she has painstakingly designed and made, there on the feet of her ex-suitor Marcello. This is a betrayal, not only of her bond with her new husband, who has lied to her, but also a public humiliation of her integrity. It is a very unsettling ending. In the film version, however, it was probably judged unwise to leave the audience in such a state of unease, so the final scene was added of Elena returning to comfort her friend, giving us hope for some redemption and light in the next series.

Sonia Saraiya wrote in Vanity Fair:

The biggest difference … between the book My Brilliant Friend and this adaptation is that the show knows it’s a tragedy, and consciously puts itself forward that way. The book—which is so conversationally written it’s like a volume of whispered confidences—is not so sure about how sad its surroundings are.

Ferrante has said she considers The Neapolitan Novels to be a single work that she was persuaded to publish in separate sections due to commercial considerations. She has expressed satisfaction at the way the first novel was adapted to the screen.

It’s difficult to write anything definitive about Ferrante because she remains fiercely protective of her real identity, saying that “books once written have no need of their authors”. Ferrante may be the first public figure to insist on complete anonymity. She argues for the writer’s right not to be known, enforces a “one country, one interview” promotional policy and has said that she is prepared to lie in interviews in order to shield her privacy.

Many critics have become amateur detectives, trying to be the one to uncover who Ferrante really is. She has admitted that she was born in Naples in 1943. She has an expert knowledge of Italian politics, and has referred to herself as a mother, although some believe she is unmarried. She works—“I study, I translate, I teach”—and has a degree in the Classics. The Italian journalist Claudio Gatti wrote in the New York Review of Books that Ferrante has provided information about herself in many interviews, but “information that was false. The Neapolitan seamstress mother, the three sisters, her life in Naples. They were all lies.”

In a talk with Elissa Schappell in Vanity Fair, Ferrante responded to allegations that she is really a man:

If there’s no author photo of a woman then the game is up: it’s clear, in that case, that we are dealing with a man or an entire team of virile male enthusiasts of the art of writing. What if, instead, we’re dealing with a new tradition of women writers who are becoming more competent, more effective, are growing tired of the literary gynaeceum and are on furlough from gender stereotypes. We know how to think, we know how to tell stories, we know how to write them as well as, if not better, than men … I hold that male colonisation of our imaginations—a calamity while ever we were unable to give shape to our difference—is, today, a strength. We know everything about the male symbol system; they, for the most part, know nothing about ours, above all about how it has been restructured by the blows the world has dealt us.

In the third novel, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the character of Elena authors a feminist text which is admired by a respected literary critic, but Ferrante insists:

As to the definition of “feminist”, I don’t know. I have loved and I love feminism because in America, in Italy, and in many other parts of the world, it managed to provoke complex thinking … I am a passionate reader of feminist thought. Yet I do not consider myself a militant; I believe I am incapable of militancy.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, in the Guardian, said: “How revolutionary it still feels to see female friendship explored onscreen in this way. It goes without saying that it takes the Bechdel Test and turns it into ragù.” The Bechdel Test was named after US cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who first used it in 1985, and created it to gauge the representation of women in fiction. It is based on three measurements: 1. Does the work feature at least two women? 2. Do the women talk to each other? 3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?

But Rachel Cooke of the New Statesman said: “I read the first of the Neapolitan novels, thought it all telling and no showing, and promptly took the other books in the series, already purchased in hot anticipation, to Oxfam.” Of the television series, she remarked:

Ludovica Nasti and Elisa del Genio, who play Lila and Lenù [Elena’s nickname] as small girls, are amazing: as sly as they are artless, as knowing as they are guileless. Their smudgy, sad faces hold the attention as the histrionic plot does not.

Sophie Gilbert, in the Atlantic, countered:

The trick of the Neapolitan novels is that they feature some of the rawest scenes of female brutality and body horror in literature, contained within covers that seem to promise beach reads or romance novels instead. Lila and Lenù’s friendship is intoxicating because, like Lila, it’s gorgeous and savage, thrilling and toxic all at once.

The language of the novel is sublime in ways that the dialogue of the series can only approximate. Although the following excerpt is recited as a voice-over, the images on the screen—a Cronenberg-like surreal montage of millions of insects crawling out of drains—distract from the brilliance of the writing:

To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighbourhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs. 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.

The magnificent period cinematography by Fabio Cianchetti more than makes up for these kinds of literary compromises and his images are a feast for the senses.

This article was written after watching the series, reading the book, then re-watching the series—while re-reading the book! Calum Henderson of the New Zealand Herald did a similar thing:

Watching the TV series and reading the book at the same time, each taking turns to nudge a little bit ahead of the other, probably isn’t the ideal way to consume either format. But both have their strengths and I find that each enhances, rather than detracts from, the other. For a TV adaptation, that has to be the ultimate praise.

The follow-up to My Brilliant Friend, based on the second book of the series, The Story of a New Name, will be released later this year. It begins in the aftermath of Lila’s wedding as the Solara family strengthen their grip on her families’ shoe business. Elena begins dating Nino Sarratore, remaining a virgin, but is seduced by Nino’s father, Donato Sarratore. She graduates and enrols in a free university in Pisa and meets the intellectual Pietro Airota, from a respected family. He proposes to Elena, who accepts. Elena writes a book, containing a fictionalised account of her night with Donato Sarratore, which is acclaimed by critics.

The projected third and fourth series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child, will also follow the novels closely. Elena becomes pregnant and abandons writing, temporarily, in favour of motherhood. Lila discovers that her son, who she believed was Nino’s, is actually Stefano’s. Elena learns that her younger sister is sleeping with Marcello Solara. Nino, who promised Elena he would leave his wife for her, refuses to do so but Elena accepts a three-way relationship and moves to Naples to be near him. Now raising three daughters, she finds herself in financial strife. She is having difficulty finishing her next novel so she sends a personal memoir of her and Lila’s childhood to her publisher instead, expecting rejection. Instead, the memoir is accepted, published and becomes successful. Elena moves back to her old neighbourhood in Naples, which has now degenerated due to the increasing drug trade, run primarily by the Solara family. Elena’s published memoir, by inadvertently revealing illegal dealings, gets the Solara family into trouble with the law. The Solaras sue Elena but Lila supplies proof of the accuracy of Elena’s claims and she and Elena write an article documenting the Solaras’ crimes. Lila’s daughter is kidnapped and they suspect the Solaras. Returning to present time, Lila still hasn’t been found and they begin to fear the worst. Then Elena receives something from their childhood days in the mail that suggests that Lila is alive and well.

In the interview with Schappell, Ferrante said:

God only knows what goes on in the mind of a friend. Absolute trust and strong affections harbour rancour, trickery and betrayal. Perhaps that’s why, over time, male friendship has developed a rigorous code of conduct. The pious respect for its internal laws and the serious consequences that come from violating them have a long tradition in fiction. Our friendships, on the other hand, are a terra incognita, chiefly to ourselves, a land without fixed rules … and at every step there is above all the risk that a story’s honesty will be clouded by good intentions, hypocritical calculations, or ideologies that exalt sisterhood in ways that are often nauseating.

Director Saverio Costanzo, scriptwriters Laura Paolucci and Francesco Piccolo, and Ferrante, have absorbed all the best elements of the classical 1950s Italian films from Bertolucci and Pasolini to De Sica and created their own insightful view of this period, written from a woman’s perspective. You will feel welcome traces of Mamma Roma and Anna Magnani, as well as Two Women and the young Sophia Loren. My Brilliant Friend is a magical and rewarding experience that places you directly in mid-twentieth-century Italy, inside authentic small-town family life.