After the well-deserved success of the adaptation of ‘Normal People’, the second novel by sally rooney, a series based on the first had to happen. The good (old) news is that it is taken care of by the team from the previous one, headed by the director lenny abrahamson (sharing functions, again, with a director, in this case Leanne Welham) and the screenwriter alice birch (‘Lady Macbeth’). Stephen Rennicks also repeats on the soundtrack. Or Suzie Lavelle in a photograph, yes, something different: digital has been exchanged for celluloid and a clear commitment to naturalism.
As a good series from the incipient Rooneyverse, ‘Conversations Between Friends’ takes place in Dublin and follows complicated love affairs or affections. In this case, the relationship to several bands between the university students Frances (alison oliver) and Bobbi (sasha lane), ex-girlfriends, to be exact, and the much wealthier marriage formed by the writer Melissa (Jemima Kirke) and actor Nick (Joe Alwyn), insecure like many of his profession.
Melissa congratulates the girls on a ‘spoken word’ recital and soon ends up getting high on them; she knows that they were involved, but that they left sex and kept poetry. Bobbi sneaks in for Melissa right away and without a hitch. Frances, however, does not want to admit (or even admit to herself) her overwhelming attraction to Nick. The connection is there from the first time they share a table: in the most important affective relationships (until then) of their lives, they are the quietest, something that can take away but also cause problems. Finally, At Melissa’s birthday party there are rapprochements that lead to agreements and disagreements and arrangements and breakups. Infinite loops of subtle emotion and sometimes not even expressed in words. In the Rooneyverse, a brief peek breaks like Thanos’ snap.
Birch, Abrahamson and allies structure this essay on the ways of the couple in (again) twelve half-hour episodes. The welcome conciseness doesn’t necessarily translate into crammed plots or ferocious pacing. Like its precedent and model, ‘Friendly Conversations’ leisurely recreates numerous forms of intimacy, the miracle, danger and liberation of what happens when two people are alone in a room.n. When the sex scenes arrive, they are again surprising for their confluence of sensitivity with turbulence. Also for its rare realism: instead of solemn choreography, we find smiles in the preambles and inexplicable tears in the death rattles.
love, always love
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It is here when it is time to point out, somewhat late, but with all the emphasis, how wonderful and natural an actress the newcomer (on screen) is, Alison Oliver, and her important chemistry with a Joe Alwyn who lately is really showing what he is capable of; as in her brief appearance in ‘The Souvenir. Part II’, offers a lesson in quiet vulnerability, at least in the five chapters (out of twelve) that have been made available to the Spanish press.
And nothing, nothing of déjà vu, as we will probably read these days. There are thousands of superhero shows and far too few serious relationship dramas, of relationships in all their psychological ambiguity and physical complication.. This chronicler wants more series with conversations between supposed friends about politics, theater, books (what an appropriate cameo from ‘Infancia’, from Tove Ditlevsenprobable reference for the poet of modest French origin) and, above all, love, always love.