Official Italian poster for L’amica geniale, showing Lila and Elena as children

This series is awful. Tacky, flat, pretentious and tame.

It looks like a well-behaved historical reconstruction from some educational film for schools. There is not a scrap of artistry here, no individuality in the direction, no sense that behind the camera stands someone with a way of looking at the world that is their own.

The sets are so blatantly artificial and irritating that at times I really struggle to watch this series. Everything looks as though, before each scene, someone thought: “I’ll put an old chair outside the entrance here and sit an old man on it… so Italian!”

Exactly. Yes, it may be “so Italian”, but if the viewer immediately sees that you did it on purpose, that you deliberately put that chair there and deliberately sat that old man on it to convey the atmosphere, setting and mood of Mediterranean countries, it does not draw an intelligent, demanding viewer into the world on screen. It throws them straight out of it. Because they can see the set.

And it is not just one unfortunate old man on a chair. That is what practically the entire series looks like. Every detail is frighteningly unnatural. From the façades of houses, streets, pavements, shops, shop windows, clothes and cars, right down to the extras playing worn-out Italians, tired mothers, men making a scene and quarrelsome women. All of it is a collection of stock images and clichés, easy to deploy because they already live in our collective picture of southern Italy.

Everything is “correct”, yet everything reeks of scenery.

Well, perhaps that was the idea: for the series, like the book, to avoid unsettling the viewer with anything unfamiliar or unknown, and instead reassure them with safe images and forms they already know.

Unfortunately, you can also see the hand of an aggressively irritating American filmmaking manner here straight away. Americans have an extraordinary talent for filtering a film set in another country, another period and another culture so thoroughly through their own cinematic language that some of the truth of that place and time simply disappears. It does not matter whether they are telling a story about the Second World War, Bolshevik Russia, antiquity, the Middle Ages or post-war Italy — very often the sets, costumes and props change, but the camera’s way of looking stays the same. And that is precisely the feeling I get here.

From the outset, the project feels as though it was built as an international “prestige drama”, rather than an intimate Italian production with an individual artistic voice. Everything is aesthetically controlled: the right dust, the right patina, the right poverty, the right sort of natural light, the right tired faces. The result is an aesthetic of authenticity instead of authenticity.

You can, after all, build a façade exactly as it looked in 1955, find the right model of car, the right cut of dress and the right shop sign, and the whole thing will still be false, because the camera’s way of looking is contemporary, industrial and devoid of risk.

In this respect, My Brilliant Friend is downright anti-neorealist to me. And at times it looks like a very elegant, expensive parody of Italian neorealism.

You only have to watch Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, or the films of De Sica, to feel the difference immediately. They were not reconstructing the past. They put the camera in a present that was dirty, unpredictable and disobedient. The street had not been prepared for the film — it simply existed. People did not look like carefully selected extras meant to look poor. Poverty did not look like a reconstruction of poverty. And that is exactly why it was real.

Here, by contrast, an enormous budget and great precision are used to recreate the result of that spontaneity. It is a bit like a very expensive museum of neorealism.

The series adds another layer of “prestige historical drama”, constantly telling the viewer: you are now looking at poor Naples in the 1950s. Instead of letting that world simply exist.

And then I start wondering what Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni or any of the great Italian directors would have done with this material — directors who could deform, exaggerate or break reality apart, yet reach something true through that very deformation.

Pasolini would probably have gone among real people and found faces that no contemporary casting team would choose. With him, poverty would not have looked like a reconstruction of poverty. Fellini would probably have exaggerated everything even further, but at least there would have been life in it, grotesquerie, absurdity, dreams, imagination and an individual language. Antonioni, in turn, might have told the story of that neighbourhood through space, railway tracks, streets, emptiness, its distance from the city and from the sea, which lies a few kilometres away but is almost at the end of the world for the children.

Each of them would probably have made an entirely different film. And that is precisely the point.

Because art begins where the artist stops merely reproducing reality correctly and starts seeing it in their own way.

Here, everything is in its proper place. And that is exactly why I feel nothing.