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The first two episodes of "My Brilliant Friend"
- a co-production with Italian broadcaster RAI - screened at the
Venice Film Festival this week to warm reviews.
"It’s impossible to make the adaption of 'My Brilliant Friend'
in any other country than Italy because the language is
crucial," said Saverio Costanzo, who directed the TV version of
the story of two girls growing up in Naples in the 1950s.
"In the beginning they speak just dialect and then they learn
how to speak Italian properly so there is no other way to
describe that story in Ohio, you cannot make it anywhere else."
It is not only U.S. audiences that will have to read subtitles.
The Italian version will also have them for some of the scenes
as the Neapolitan dialect is hard to understand for anyone
outside the southern port city.
Costanzo said he still did not know the novelist's real
identity. Ferrante's decision to hide behind a pen-name and not
publicly identify herself is a real-life literary mystery story
that has added to the allure of her books that are best-sellers
in Europe and the United States.
"I really respect the fact that she doesn’t want to put herself
in front because that makes (the) professional relationship, the
one we have, very clean," Costanzo, who communicated with
Ferrante via email while writing the script, said.
The Hollywood Reporter said the series had got off to an
"extraordinarily promising beginning".
"My Brilliant Friend is blissfully neither based in a gauzy
nostalgia nor mired in an affected documentary-style misery
porn. It simply and cleanly embraces the details of everyday
life, occasionally dirty or impoverished or ominous, spiked with
moments of memory-infused whimsy."
The Venice Film Festival runs from Aug. 29 to Sept 8.
(Writing by Robin Pomeroy; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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