My Bril­liant Friend ​‘The Dolls’ review – A heart­felt por­trait of post­war Italy

A vibrat­ing phone lights up a dark room. An elder­ly woman switch­es on her bed­side lamp and picks up, seem­ing­ly unde­terred by being wok­en from her slum­ber in the mid­dle of the night. A male voice on the oth­er end of the line informs her that moth­er is miss­ing again. We expect a moment of pan­ic, at the very least a hint of sad­ness and con­cern, but this is not forth­com­ing. The woman tells him to move on, learn to live on his own and nev­er to call her again in an unemo­tive tone.

Fol­low­ing the strange noc­tur­nal phone-call, she wan­ders through the spa­cious hall­ways of her home unrushed and unsur­prised. Stop­ping to stand before her win­dow and look on to the faint street lights beneath, she reach­es for her phone. ​“Did you look in her clos­et?” she asks, when the same man’s voice picks up on the oth­er end.

He tells her that all his mother’s belong­ings are gone and that she has cut her face out of every fam­i­ly pho­to­graph. The woman tells him that’s his prob­lem and hangs up the phone. She stares into space for a long moment, one which is not emp­ty: it holds the vibrant mem­o­ry of the man’s moth­er, her child­hood friend, Lila (Ludovi­ca Nas­ti), the tit­u­lar bril­liant friend in HBO’s new series, based on the nov­el by Ele­na Fer­rente. The woman is Ele­na Gre­co, and she’s got a sto­ry to tell.

Direct­ed by Save­rio Costan­zo, My Bril­liant Friend is a heart­felt adap­ta­tion of Ferrente’s inti­mate sto­ry of a spe­cial friend­ship that blos­somed in 1950s Italy. Told from the point of view of a young Ele­na (Elisa del Genio), series open­er ​‘The Dolls’ dives straight into her post­war Naples neigh­bour­hood and the lives, intrigues and hard­ship of all the fam­i­lies that inhab­it it. Elena’s build­ing is made up of two con­flict­ing fam­i­lies who act as fod­der for the dai­ly gos­sip that is exchanged between the bal­conies fram­ing the small plaza where she plays with her friends.

The women of the build­ing are loud, bru­tal and unfor­giv­ing of one another’s indis­cre­tions; a har­mo­nious sense of sis­ter­hood seems unimag­in­able at this stage, and most daugh­ters mim­ic their behav­iour in their own, child­ish ways. But not Ele­na. She refus­es to fall vic­tim to the same pat­tern and some­how intu­its that Lila, her unkempt, incred­i­bly valiant and intel­li­gent, class com­peti­tor can teach her how to break it.

Lila is for­ev­er chal­leng­ing those around her, often to the point of endan­ger­ing her­self, all for the sake of defy­ing the patri­archy. She reads, writes and is not afraid of retal­i­at­ing when boys throw rocks at her. And she’s the only child in the neigh­bour­hood who seems unafraid to face the as yet face­less, noto­ri­ous loan shark, Don Achille. She has a real way of get­ting to Ele­na – and the view­er – with her ball­sy atti­tude and lust for life and pos­es a huge threat to the boys.

Gen­der stereo­types are repeat­ed­ly rein­forced on the chil­dren, passed down from one gen­er­a­tion to the next. Those who do not abide by them are ridiculed: a father who push­es the baby car­riage; a boy who cries for not know­ing an answer in class or – god for­bid – is beat­en by a girl in a school con­test. These instances are all cause for name-call­ing, beat­ings or worse.

With a superb cast of child actors who brought more emo­tion to ​‘The Dolls’ than the building’s wail­ing wid­ow lit­ter­ing the streets below them with pots and pans in the throes of a ner­vous break­down, My Bril­liant Friend promis­es to be an authen­tic peri­od piece, detail­ing the com­plex­i­ty of human rela­tion­ships and how they are informed by their past and present circumstances.