My Brilliant Friend episodes 7 & 8 review, Culture Whisper
How do you make television into a work of art? My Brilliant Friend is the perfect show to ask, being a series of almost unprecedented visual and narrative ambition.
Creator/writer/director Saverio Costanzo doesn’t content himself only with massive sets and delicious locations, but orbits them around such rich and refined characters so vivid that they have their own gravitational pulls. And even in these closing episodes – seven and eight in the season, 15 and 16 in the series – Costanzo continues to experiment and surprise and shock.
Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) is three years into her university course in Pisa. It's 1967, approaching the year of global protest and Italy’s violently political Years of Lead. Elena's hair is cut short. She wears fashionable glasses and lovely jumpers, all while roaming in the thick of academic life and the throes of a fun romance.
