Greg and Zanna explore the new normal.
SCORES
Great new relationships: 4
Great old relationships: 5
SHE SAW
There was an episode of Normal People, the television adaption of another of Sally Rooney's books, in which I cried
hysterically - not just welling up, but the kind of heaving sobs Oprah used to call "the ugly cry." I'm somewhat surprised, therefore, that the latest adaptation of a Rooney book, Conversations with Friends, left me mostly unaffected and, at times, a bit annoyed. It has many of the same ingredients of Normal People - a passionate romance involving a very young, highly intelligent but timid, almost coquettish, female lead, an abundance of fully nude love scenes, and a dreamy foreign holiday house, but I just couldn't get invested in this story.
Maybe I'm unwittingly making a harsh moral judgement because the object of the female lead's affection is a married man. Or perhaps it's because I've tried very, very hard to find personalities in either of these characters, but cannot. This issue is not entirely without acknowledgement in the series: Frances (Alison Oliver) jokes with Nick (Joe Alwyn) about what she finds attractive about him, saying, "Do you have a personality?" But I wasn't quite sure how to take that. Certainly, their primary attraction towards one another is physical but so few words are spoken between them, and they're so awkward and unimportant, I struggled to buy into their chemistry. Where Normal People so magnificently captured the mind bending, body snatching drama that is teen romance, this felt almost juvenile.
It's hard not to compare Alison Oliver with Normal People's Daisy Edgar Jones. There's a definite similarity in their performances, a sort of mannered shyness with bedroom eyes, which could be the result of both these characters being proxies for Rooney, or might be the direction of Lenny Abrahamson who, among others, is behind both shows.