Watching: My Brilliant Friend

I'm on episode five of My Brilliant Friend on HBO and it's an incredibly faithful adaptation of the book, so far.  The acting is uniformly terrific, and the materiality of the locations, the objects, the clothing, is all as important as the action and the communication of the characters.

I'm fascinated by the way the characters switch between Neapolitan dialect and standard Italian. One side of my mother's family was from Gesualdo, about 90 kilometers from Naples.I asked her why she doesn't like the books and she more or less refused to tell me until I've finished them. I have the second volume, The Story of a New Name, from the library.

Here's a great little interview with the costume designer, Antonella Cannarozzi, who was nominated for an Oscar for her work on I Am Love with Tilda Swinton.