Elena Ferrante writes about the inside of a woman the way other authors write about weather, as a force with its own pressure systems, its sudden squalls, its long grey stretches that flatten everything. For years the consensus held that this was precisely what could not survive the jump to the screen. The novels live so far inside the skull of their narrators that the camera, which sees only surfaces, seemed the wrong instrument entirely. And yet the adaptations keep arriving, and the best of them keep finding ways to film what should not be filmable. My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults are not illustrations of Ferrante. They are arguments about how interiority becomes image, and the argument turns out to be more interesting than anyone expected.
Naples as a Character, Not a Backdrop
The first thing the screen versions get right is that Naples is not scenery. In the books the city is a system, a set of laws about who may rise and who is held down, and the dialect itself functions as a kind of weather front, switching on when violence is near and switching off when characters reach for respectability. The adaptations honor this by refusing the postcard. The rione, the poor neighborhood where Lila and Elena grow up, is rendered as a sealed world of stairwells and courtyards, of doors that everyone watches. When the story climbs toward the wealthier districts the air changes, the colors warm, and you feel the altitude the way the characters feel it, as something earned and provisional and easily lost.
This is where the casting of nonprofessional local actors, many of them children from the actual neighborhoods, becomes more than a curiosity. Their faces carry a geography that no drama school could supply, and the dialect they speak is not a costume but the medium through which class announces itself in every scene. The subtitles translate the words but not the register, and can only gesture at how much information a single switch of language conveys. The decision to shoot so much of the action in constructed sets rather than the modern city deepens this. Ferrante's Naples is a place of memory, and the slight artificiality of the built world gives it the quality of a thing remembered rather than merely seen, filtered through grief and rivalry and love.
Filming the Interior
The central problem remains. How do you photograph a sentence that describes the dissolving of the self, the experience Ferrante's narrators call smarginatura, the sensation of margins giving way, of the boundaries between people and objects coming undone? The answer the adaptations reach for is not voiceover, though voiceover is used. It is the patient, almost unbearable hold on a face. The camera lingers on a girl watching another girl, and in that watching the whole architecture of envy and adoration and need is allowed to build without a word. Ferrante's interiority is, at its root, the interiority of attention, of one woman unable to stop reading another, and a long look turns out to be the most faithful translation available.
Her interiority is the interiority of attention, one woman unable to stop reading another, and a long held look turns out to be the most faithful translation available.
What the screen cannot fully carry is the narrator's unreliability, the way the prose lets you suspect that Elena is shaping Lila to suit her own wounds. Film tends to grant its images an authority that the written I never claims. The adaptations push back where they can, foregrounding the act of narration, reminding us that we are inside one woman's account and not a neutral record. It is an imperfect solution, and the imperfection is honest. Some part of Ferrante stays on the page, and the work is stronger for admitting it rather than pretending to have caught everything.
The Body, the Shame, and the Vanished Author
Ferrante's women live in bodies that betray them and define them, that bleed and swell and age and refuse to be ignored, and the shame attached to those bodies is inseparable from the shame of class. The Lying Life of Adults turns on a girl told she is growing ugly, growing to resemble a despised aunt, and the cruelty of that sentence detonates an entire coming of age. The screen treats these moments without flinching and without leering, which is harder than it sounds. The body is filmed as a site of knowledge and humiliation at once, the place where a girl first learns what the world intends to do with her.
It matters, finally, that no one knows who Ferrante is. Her anonymity is not a marketing trick but a condition of the work, a refusal to let a public face stand between the reader and the page. The result is that the writing feels unguarded in a way that authored, branded fiction rarely does, and the adaptations inherit that freedom. With no celebrated novelist hovering over the production, no familiar persona to flatter, the screen versions are left alone with the only thing that ever mattered, the fierce and unsentimental life of women in a city that tried to keep them small. That the camera has learned to honor it is one of the quiet achievements of recent television.