In Hulu's Conversations with Friends adaptation, tracing the fluid walls of adolescent friendship

We see Frances (Alison Oliver) and Bobbi (Sasha Lane) at a studio bar in the first episode, performing poetry to an enthused audience. Reciting it in unison, in voice that is modulated; syllables stressed and loosened at different intervals for the sake of an emotive assertion – a dramatic staging. The poem is Frances’ brainchild. The performance is Bobbi’s core competency. Together, they complement each other’s prowess. Bedazzle. The performance is impossible without their pairing. The pairing is an extension of their long-standing friendship. Their friendship lies at the heart of Conversations with Friends, the Hulu-BBC adaptation of the eponymous novel by Sally Rooney – a debut, about which Zadie Smith said: “she couldn’t believe it was one.”

The introductory performance in the first episode is perhaps an unseemly sign of Frances and Bobbi’s imperative for the other. Akin to the performance, their lives too are interrelated and interdependent, to the point where they are a cause, pre-condition, cope, of each other’s sorrow and hope. Frances and Bobbi are, in today’s vocabulary, best friends – from, until – forever.

Frances and Bobbi have known each other since childhood. In what is a case of rare parallelism, their lives have coincided from school up till college, from childhood to teenage to adolescence. From familial settings to independent living. Rooney, the author of the novel the series is based on, spoke of writing “characters in college campuses, at a time when the family was not a dominant presence in their lives.” Frances and Bobbi, the friends, are a product of this vision, while also being peculiar, in that they’re not friends who meet each other at college, or befriend each other during adulthood, but share an intimate, romantic rather, history from their childhoods. They’re not people met and befriended in college who alter one’s lives in that span, but friends who’ve shaped each others’ lives all throughout. Like two peas in a pod. Dant Kati Roti. Amico Intimo.

The depth of Frances’ and Bobbi’s friendship is unrenewable. No one, not even Nick (Joe Alwyn), who Frances romances, can retrace a relationship as intrinsic as Bobbi shares with her. Frances impresses this extent in her response to Bobbi feeling like an intruder in her life at one point. “Doesn’t make sense to me. When I think of my life, I imagine you at the centre,” she cryingly mutters. As a duality, though, this depth also causes, the tensions that arise between the duo, and the slights and betrayals they feel towards each other – the inevitable flip side of closeness.

But all exemplary virtues aside, the more commonplace evidence of a friendship, any friendship, are visible in sufficiency too: Bobbi overstating Frances’ political inclinations in their first meeting with Nick, coaxing her into the vacation in Croatia, staying put at Frances’ pad at the time of need, or Frances offering Bobbi a place to stay in a dire situation. There is, beside every element else, the usual concern for a friend’s health and soundness. Frances and Bobbi may be special friends by virtue of their shared past, but in some, at least some ways, they are like any other bankable friend of one.

A transition from school to college, or puberty to adulthood, comes with the collateral of lost friends. Frances and Bobbi are exceptional in that sense, for their chords never break, but suffer — at the same time — inescapably, from their individual evolution. From the first meeting with Nick and his writer wife Melissa (Jemima Kirke), to the proceeds of the affair between Nick and Frances, the friendliness of the duo hits lows, more specifically at times when they’re closer to Nick or Melissa. Bobbi crushes over Melissa from the outset, in all possibility leaving and accruing Frances to be alone. ‘cept Nick too is alone therein. Later on, Frances hurts and distances Bobbi in the course of her dalliance with Nick, more than once. In moving closer to another, they only move farther from each other.

The binary is almost underwritten: of how their friendship is aversive to their outgrowths outside of it. How their concomitant schooling and friendship and love in the formative years, leads to an unspoken alienation when they’re not a part of most, almost all, smaller and larger spheres of each others’ grown-up lives. These are also, very specifically, conundrums of adolescence, wherein friendships — as families don’t remain “dominant” — turn to play a vital role.

The series thus, acutely tests the limit of this vitality, of the permeability of an adolescent friendship. What does it take to remain ‘best friends forever,’ it sets out to examine.

That Bobbi and Frances only vacillate between the poles of affection and disaffection as Nick and Melissa come and go, and share a romantic past, more than suggests a closed boundary, or an ingrained desire for one, in their friendship. This is also where it differs from the usual and archetypal portraits of a friend. For even as it remains and unsaid, Bobbi and Frances, in some sense, share a ‘romantic friendship’ — somewhere in between an alliance and an amicable bond. Its most striking marker comes towards the end, in not just their lovemaking, but Frances’ declamation, of “staying committed, but in their own ways.” Bobbi agrees to the proposition. The duality, Nick and Frances’ ties, lay broken by then.

Frances and Bobbi’s friendship operates in a totally ambiguous zone, allowing for both lack, and presence of, expectations. It’s both remarkable and resonant at the same time. Bobbi and Frances, the childhood friends. Bobbi and Frances at loggerheads. Bobbi and Frances at performances. Bobbi and Frances, the romantic partners. Alison Oliver as Frances, and Sasha Lane as Bobbi, embody all that Rooney makes her characters of. The former is tentative, introverted, and quiet. Oliver, likewise, in her mannerisms and gait and speech, is perpetually inwards. Lane as Bobbi, as the forthcoming presence, the performing partner, speaks with little restraint.

A very literal, and slightly reductive, perhaps, extraction of the title Conversations with Friends is the conversations friends have with each other. Frances and Bobbi converse, write to each other, speak on the phone – use nearly all modern means of communication. When not talking, Frances returns to their earlier exchanges. Furthermore, she writes a story with Bobbi as the central character. In essence, their conversations, or lack thereof, always, always hold the key, in whatever kinds and time they surface. The ambiguous beauty of their friendship too is contained in these conversations. In a way, the conversations are a carrier of the very ambiguity that creates them. Creates the two friends, Frances and Bobbi. Their friendship and fights.

Conversations with Friends is streaming on Lionsgate Play in India

Raunaq Saraswat is a freelance writer and a final year undergraduate at IIT Delhi. He writes mostly about culture, books, and cinema.

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