Judy Blume Classic adapted in the Netflix series

Stuck in the copy of Forever… That I downloaded as a search for this review, just after dedication and just before the first chapter, is a note from the author Judy Blume. Although the book was published for the first time in 1975, this particular section was added in 2014, to provide more up -to -date information on IST prevention.

It is a tiny Addendum, really – only one page – and all that follows can be read exactly as it did for the last half century. However, this speaks volumes about the lasting popularity of the novel and the desire to have to reconsider your own classic in a more current context.

The changes to the new version of Netflix Forever are much more radical and quite impossible to ignore. But seen from this angle, the updates look less like a refutation of the original than an embrace of his mind, executed with enough freshness to stand up and enough charm to inspire a new generation to fall (if not necessarily in love).

In generation of credits, the series of creator Mara Brock Akil is indicated as “inspired” from Blume's book rather than “based on” – a small but key distinction. In general, the intrigue, insofar as there is one, remains the same. The boy (Justin by Michael Cooper) meets Girl (Keisha de Lovie Simone) during a New Year's Evening, in a first managed by Regina King. The boy and the girl quickly fall to each other and spend the coming months navigating in the ups and downs, before the imminent end of the school threatens to tear them.

Zoom closer, however, and almost everything about the way this story takes place has changed. The role of the protagonist is no longer held by a white girl in the suburbs of New Jersey in the 1970s, but divided between two black teenagers who take place from South Los Angeles to Hollywood Hills in 2018. (Which, technically, does, Forever An early piece of the period – the characters even spend time for an arclight.) The couple always fights with jealousy, uncertainty over the future and the anxieties of sexual intimacy, and the boy always in a stupid way, refers to his “ralph” penis. But Keisha's nuptial parade and Justin takes place in distinctly 21st century terms: Instagram hashtag as a big gesture, sex tape as a romantic obstacle, insane texts like ephemeral newspaper entries.

While Forever is a teenage romance in the soul, her vision of young lovers extends far beyond their intense tangle. While Keisha and Justin solve their feelings towards each other, they are also dealing with parental pressure, their post-high plans, the realities of moving as black in a world that can be hostile to them. In a scene, Justin, a rich boy who frequents a mainly white private school, is overwhelmed after spending time with classmates from the mainly black Catholic school in Keisha: “I do not think I have already known this kind of darkness before,” he exclaims, with the idication of someone who hung a burden that he did not even carry.

As with another recent Blume adaptation, Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret,, Forever extends to her parental figures the same grace she makes to their children. He sympathizes with Justin's mother, Dawn (Karen Pittman) fearing the worst when he drives alone at night, even if it gets his frustration in the face of his overprotectivity, and with his father Eric (Wood Harris, particularly wonderful) wanting to see his son accomplish what he could not, even if it sees how Justin carries these expectations. He feels both for the immense pride Shelly (Xosha Roquemore) welcomes his golden daughter Keisha, and the pressure that Keisha feels to maintain the idealized vision of his mother at all costs. Forever sees that any real understanding of these children must include an understanding of the forces that have so lovingly, although imperfectly, has shaped them.

All this update comes with growing pain. By widening the intrigue at eight episodes of an hour (probably twice as long as I needed to read the book), and time of about six months to about a year and a half, Forever spends too long to separate his central pair, then repel them together, then separate them again. Cooper and Simone's performances move separately, and downright adorable together, whenever Justin and Keisha flirt under FaceTime or tenderly exploring the bodies of the other. But even their lively chemistry cannot completely overcome the exhaustion of watching Keisha block Justin on his phone, or vice versa, for the umpteenth time.

Once the two have finally gathered their act, their longer period of stability of happiness passes in an assembly of Instagram carousels. It is a kind of disappointment after all the time that we have invested in the portion on each glossy text or an argument in tears of their first days, and flies Forever of some of his emotional intimacy and his heft. We find ourselves with a better idea of ​​what was held between Keisha and Justin that what made them so inexorably together, of the brilliant potential of the relationship that his richer daily reality.

(And as for their relationships with other peers, forget him – Justin has exactly an occasional friend, played by Niles Fitch, who sometimes invites him to parties, and Keisha exactly a best friend, played by Ali Gallo, whose only goal in life is to support Keisha. In a strange omission for a different series.

But zooming again, and what becomes clear is that whatever his radical changes change or forgivable defects, Akil Forever keeps what matters most in its source equipment. Famous Blume Forever… In response to her daughter's request for a story in which “two nice children … have sex without one or the other having to die”. During the decades since then, culture has evolved enough for the sexuality of adolescents to be the social taboo that it was in the past, even if Blume's novel remains a basic food of the lists of “most prohibited books”.

But as long as there are adolescents who grow up in an imperfect world, there will be a need for stories that will take the experience of being young and in love and lust seriously. This considers the efforts of adolescents with an abundance of empathy and a minimum of judgment. This allows them to grow in their time and compassion to do so on their own conditions. Tales, in other words, like that of Blume Forever… has been for so many past and present readers – and like Akil Forever Maybe now for viewers today and, hopefully, for generations to follow.