My Brilliant Friend and I May Destroy You: extraordinary commonality of interest.

[PerditaProvokesEnmity]

I don't know if anyone else has spent the past few weeks immersed in both of these series simultaneously - I'm feeling almost blessed to be alive at a time when two such immaculate expressions of womanhood are being broadcast on TV/streaming services.

They're very different, of course - I don't always love the way Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend has been directed, but its slow accretion of action and reaction and the resulting emotion is staggeringly immersive; whereas IMDY is more immediately attention grabbing and undeniably, brilliantly gobsmacking - but I wish the characters could meet each other and examine the way women's lives have changed, and stayed the same, over the past eighty odd years.

(I should say there's already a thriving active thread on IMDY - not trying to replicate that. I'm thinking more of comparison between the two series - perhaps beginning with the final episodes of MBF Season 2 and IMDY.)

I've just watched the first season of MBF and absolutely loved it.
Seen 2 episodes of I may destroy you and just didn't like it. I know its had fab reviews but wasn't my thing.

S1 of MBF is wonderful - but you must watch S2, where the girls are in their teens and things get a whole lot more complicated. I don't think I'd ever properly realised the life trajectory of very poor, working class Italian girls in the post war period - the challenges they faced are usually only presented seriously on TV in the context of 'Third World' stories.

IMDY improves exponentially with each of the first six episodes. It's worth persevering with.

I could happily spend the rest of the summer disentangling the similarities and differences between the two series. Where IMDY deals with consent in the context of sexual life, MBF centres on trust, and the betrayal of trust, in the context of class struggle - and what we see is women, wrong-footed time after time, having to deal with the consequences of exercising whatever freedom they have.

I’ve seen IMDY on iPlayer, I really liked it, where can I stream MBF?

I've just answered this question on another thread - so have c&p:

"I watched Season 1 on Now TV, and Season 2 on iTunes. (No TV or TV licence. Have spent a fortune over lockdown, but I really object to the TV licence people's strong arm harassment and won't give them a penny.)

I don't know for sure but imagine either one or both might be on iPlayer atm.

Do give them a try!"

Oh, I don’t have now tv. Do you have to pay per episode in iTunes?

I loved MBF. Haven’t seen I May Destroy You yet. The class analysis in MBF is so insightful. No matter what way working class women of that era turn they’re trapped in a patriarchal world that only sees them as objects. Even when they do work, the businesses are run by men and their lives are highly controlled. It gave me a good insight into what working class women’s lives were like in the past before social mobility improved and the economy expanded to create more diverse opportunities (and less job security in other ways...). It shows why young women were so desperate to marry post-war, the opportunities open to them for work and independent life were so limited. It’s refreshing too to watch something focused on a class analysis of society. Everything on the left now is driven by identity politics and the working class have been fractured by it to the extent that few people truly understand the impact of class dynamics in society any more.