Ferrante addiction is a global pandemic, of course.
In macro, the mind races for heavy comparisons: Woolf, Tolstoy, Eliot, the other Eliot.
And Ferrantes style is intimate, confessional, very funny.
Credit: Eduardo Castaldo/HBO
(Further seasons would, theoretically, adapt the later books.)
Director Saverio Costanzo films this coming-of-age story with admirable fluency.
The show cant compete with the book for sheer hallucinatory artistry.
Its a whole community brought to fearful life.
More simply, this is the story of a woman remembering her youth.
We meet elderly Elena (Elisabetta De Palo) in the present-ish day.
Her childhood friend Lila has just disappeared.
This absence sends her back through memories of postwar Naples.
Here we meet young Elena (Elisa Del Genio), a quiet and thoughtful child.
Theres a dreamy quality to the first two episodes.
Lila and Elena develop a fantastical understanding of the real terror lingering all around.
One local powermonger looks, to the girls, like a monster out of fairy tales.
Working with a writing staff that includesthe mysterious Ferranteherself, Costanzo adeptly paces this long story.
Del Genio is quite a find, her searching eyes a near-perfect expression of Book Elenas watchful narrative gaze.
And Nastis a T-shirt icon of precocious toughness.
Her brazen confidence makes Lila invigorating, and a bit freaky.
You want to be on her side.
Its all even more complicated than that, of course.
Both roles are tricky.
Girace shines as Lila.
Mazzucco has to play a more internal, anxiously adolescent Elena.
It took a few hours, but I grooved onto her energy.
Her performance reminds you that most teen introverts spend their waking life simmering with rage at their own shyness.
Teenage Elena, man,sono io.
Around the lead characters, we start to see a whole generation come of age.
A swooning dance sequence sparks a local love quadrangle.
A rooftop fireworks celebration sparkles with all the innocent possibilities of youth.
Enemies become friends, maybe more, or maybe not.
