"My Brilliant Friend" on HBO

Just when you think you cannot be kicked in the genitals anymore it kicks you again with the pain of that era. I remember people of that era because when Lila and Lenu are about 20 to 22 I was around 12 years old. I saw people act just like this and dress just like this even though I lived in Los Angeles at the time. People were much more one dimensional than now. People were much less complicated except for a few intellectuals then. So, there was this big divide between people who had been to college and those who hadn't.

You sort of always knew who had been to college because they acted completely differently and were much more formal and sometimes much freer than people who lived only by their scared superstitions then of whatever they believed that had nothing to do usually with Science or things that made sense beyond old wives tales.

And yet it was usually the common people, the blue collar people who lived "Where the rubber meets the road" where life was the most real.

So, intellectuals often got "Lost in the clouds" too and were so full of themselves they never ever got their feet on the ground ever again.

So, this divide between the common people and the intellectuals was always there and all the problems of each group of people have blended now much more than then. Class warfare was at it's height in the 1950s and 1960s but now it's much more blended because almost everyone has been to at least one year of college or more now. So people tend to understand more about what college is all about than around 1959 or 1960 when this is supposed to take place.

If you hadn't been to college it was much more mysterious then than now. You see this in the interplay between Lila and Lenu.

If you haven't watched "My Brilliant Friend" you are in for a very classic Italian 1950s European story. It is likely written by Lenu of her life growing up I would say because all the elements are there so likely it is based upon a true story. This is a really classic tale of the times in Italy, all in Italian with English subtitles on HBO.