Why Fans of Elena Ferrante Should Watch <em>The Best of Youth </em>

When fans of My Brilliant Friend have finished the first season of HBO’s acclaimed television adaptation, they may find themselves looking to fill a void. The eight-episode series, which aired its finale earlier this month, followed the lives of Lenù and Lila, two girls growing up in a poor neighborhood in Naples in the mid-20th century. Their thorny, intense friendship—which Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan novels chronicle in intricate detail over the duo’s lifetime—has been fascinating to witness on the small screen. But until Season 2 arrives, viewers might consider passing the time with another acclaimed epic offering a simultaneously intimate and sweeping view of postwar Italy: the 2003 film The Best of Youth (or, La Meglio Gioventù).

When a about HBO’s noted that “this is a prestige Italian production, assembling the great and the good of the country’s cinema and TV,” the author could have easily been talking about. Originally envisioned as a TV miniseries, the two-part, six-hour film directed by Marco Tullio Giordana follows two Italian brothers over the course. said that the film, despite its length, “doesn’t have a boring millisecond.” described the movie glowingly as a “novel” that made him feel as though he had “dropped outside of time.”