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It was always unlikely that Conversations with Friends, the new Hulu and BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s first novel, would be able to repeat the lightning strike of Normal People. The latter show, another Hulu/BBC production based on Rooney’s bestselling second novel and released in April 2020, was the rare combination of right material, right time. Its straightforward, though elegantly told, premise – on-and-off, boy-girl love story over several years – and naturalistic, genuinely hot depictions of physical intimacy (one sex scene lasted 9 minutes and 24 seconds, a full third of the episode) struck a nerve during a time of mass isolation.
Like Normal People’s Marianne, Frances is a typical Rooney protagonist: intellectual, thin, confident when expressing her leftist views, aloof and tongue-tied when verbalizing her feelings. What can be detailed in the book as neuroticism comes off on screen as coldness, inexplicable wordlessness. Nick and Frances are two awkward people often behaving awkwardly, and passing that discomfort – or, given how little we can discern of these characters, blankness – to the audience. Their numerous sex scenes, which like Normal People employed an intimacy coordinator, are expertly choreographed and sensitively filmed yet lack a fundamental chemistry – motions without feelings. When Frances tells him, in bed on a Croatian holiday with Bobbi and Melissa, that she doubted his interest in her because “you don’t always seem that enthusiastic,” he answers that it’s not her – “it’s me, I’m just awkward.” She replies, “me too, obviously,” and they kiss.
Carrying over both Rooney’s reticent style and digital communication is a tall order, and the loss to translation is a palpable absence. Conversations with Friends is frequently beautiful and steadfastly naturalistic – we see the characters in transit, getting dressed, texting with clear timestamps for the summer of 2019 – but keeps its characters terse, two-dimensional and frustratingly inscrutable. It’s a curiously flat mixture – pretty people in pretty places, decent acting (particularly from leads Alison Oliver and Joe Alwyn) and well-choreographed, vérité sex scenes that mostly run cold.