“Conversations with friends”, the vast facets of feeling

It landed – surprisingly – on RaiPlay on 10 March Conversations with friends, series in twelve half-hour episodes produced by BBC Three and Hulu and adaptation of the well-known debut novel by Sally Rooney. Much awaited story after the successful audiovisual translation of Normal Peoplethe series once again focuses on a narrative universe dear (and near) to Rooney, staging sentimental and friendship relationships and trying to tell them in their various facets. At the center of the story are two friends and former lovers, Frances and Bobbi: the first shy, a lover of literature and books and with a reflective character, the second strong-willed and combative. They attend college in Dublin (final year) and, during a public poetry reading, they meet a young couple of intellectuals. Melissa is a successful, rebellious and unscrupulous writer while her husband Nick is a theater actor and appears more insecure and shy. A complicity arises between the four: while Bobbi and Melissa form a friendship with a sapphic twist, Nick and Frances begin an intense and passionate relationship.

The focus of the series it has the character of Frances as its central pivot, her search for her own identity and the story of her emotions and interiority in her relationship with Nick, while the bond between the two women remains in the background and punctuates the story only in certain situations. As is paradigmatic of Rooney’s writing, the series emotionally probes the characters and their thoughts but from a factual point of view it is very rarefied (and consequently with a slow and dilated rhythm). The visual texture is interesting – a bit dirty, indie film style – and the musical research is also punctual.

What, on the other hand, arouses a certain perplexity, and which leads to results Conversations with friends a not so successful adaptation – it is above all the choice of its interpreters. Being in fact – how Normal People – of a story that stands almost exclusively about alchemy and the subtle dynamics of the characterscast choices have been made that don’t seem to go in this direction. The most bubble is definitely Alice Oliver who interprets with credibility a Frances with the body of a child, a clean face, viaticum of innocence and fragility. Decidedly less focused is Joe Alwyn who plays Nick: too young, too unglamorous, without those little inner beats that would make the game of gazes and seduction that the man exerts on Frances effective on the screen.

Is Conversations with Friend faithful to the novel it is based on?

Basically yes. And this is not necessarily a good thing. In fact, the series borrows the narrative structure of Rooney’s Parlarne tra Amici (published in Italy by Einaudi), re-proposing dialogues and dramaturgical solutions already present in the original text but which do not always adapt incisively to the visual language. The whole figure of Rooney’s literariness emerges, of a writing that knows how to enter the interiority of the characters – often by subtraction – and which releases all its potential on the written page (while remaining closely linked to the acting skills in her life on the screen). The multifaceted and deep bond between the two friends also loses a bit of focus and power (following the lines of illustrious precedents such as Ferrante) which in the series has a greater space in the second part of the story while for the first few episodes it remains muted.

What are the settings of Conversations with friends?

The series is mainly set in Dublin, Rooney’s city of origin and a place whose atmospheres are faithfully reproduced. There is a good balance between the story of life in the Irish capital and the staging of the suburbs, towns and seaside realities on the coast. A couple of episodes are instead set in Croatia, in a holiday villa overlooking the sea, with various outbuildings, exposed stones, wood and light fixtures, a place where the passion between Frances and Nick is rekindled and the beginning of their decline.

Conversations with friends, in three bars

“I like the transience of things like interpretive reading. It bothers me to think that something can last forever.”

“Sometimes you need to feel useful”.

“Look, you can be in love and have other stories too. Love is not a limited resource”.