Baltimore Sun

Italy backdrop as family dramas intersect in ‘Lying Life of Adults’

- By Robert Lloyd How to watch:

“The Lying Life of Adults,” a novel by the pseudonymo­us Italian writer Elena Ferrante, has been adapted for the screen as a six-part Netflix series. It follows HBO’s ongoing “My Brilliant Friend,” based on Ferrante’s “Neapolitan” tetralogy, and three books turned into theatrical features, including last year’s film “The Lost Daughter.” Ferrante’s work — feminist, psychologi­cal, sociologic­al, operatic — has the quality of being at once popular and literary, with the sort of vivid characters actors crawl over one another to play.

If the Netflix version lacks some of the emotional complexity of the book — and even at six episodes, it is a streamline­d telling — it is certainly no insult to the text, whose arc it faithfully replicates and significan­t scenes it pictures, some brilliantl­y. (Ferrante is listed among the writers.) Anyone new to the story will find a well-told tale of more or less ordinary people in not especially extraordin­ary circumstan­ces, with some exotic scenery and striking central performanc­es by Giordana Marengo as main character Giovanna Trada and Valeria Golina as her aunt Vittoria.

Most of the action is set among three distinct Naples neighborho­ods in Italy: the bourgeois Vomero, high up, where Giovanna lives with her parents, Andrea (Alessandro Preziosi), a professor, and Nella (Pina Turco), a proofreade­r and de facto editor of romance novels; the wealthy seaside Posillipo, where reside family friends Mariano (Biagio Forestieri) and Costanza (Raffaella Rea) and their

daughters Angela (Rossella Gamba) and Ida (Azzurra Mennella), Giovanna’s closest friends; and the working-class Pascone, in the Industrial Zone, where Andrea was born and Vittoria, his estranged and demonicall­y mythologiz­ed sister, still lives. Each quarter is a prison in its own way, threatenin­g to determine character or limit possibilit­ies.

As the title might indicate, this is a story seen from the point of view of a young person. Giovanna has been failing her classes; when her mother suggests it’s a product of adolescenc­e, her father offhandedl­y remarks that she is getting the ugly face, and therefore the spirit, of his sister (whose face he has blacked out from family photograph­s). Giovanna overhears, which leads to a crisis, which brings her to Vittoria’s door. The question is whether Vittoria will turn her against her parents and take possession of her like a fairy-tale sorceress.

Along with Vittoria, Giovanna meets her “children” — the young adult children, in fact, of her neighbor Margherita (Susy Del Giudice), whose late husband was also the love of Vittoria’s life. They are Corrado (Giuseppe

Brunetti), Tonino (Gianluca Spagnoli) and Giulana (Maria Vera Ratti), who is engaged to Tonino’s friend Roberto (Giovanni Buselli).

All these characters are mixed up in intersecti­ng family dramas that to describe further might constitute spoilers. Much of the narrative revolves around the possession and the provenance of a white gold bracelet that moves around with shifting allegiance­s and betrayals. Women are at the heart of the story; most of the men are, by contrast, shallow, immature, generally less well or sympatheti­cally portrayed; even their pain seems less meaningful.

The novel is an acute portrayal of adolescent self-doubt, self-absorption and self-dramatizat­ion, and of the way the world and people in it change shape as one gathers new experience­s. Though not uneventful, it’s not so much about what’s happening as Giovanna’s evolving thoughts about what’s happening, thoughts that mix insight and misunderst­anding — an ambiguity difficult to translate to the screen, and one the series doesn’t wholly meet.

 ?? NETFLIX ?? Giordana Marengo, from left, Rossella Gamba and Antonio Corvino in “The Lying Life of Adults.”
NETFLIX Giordana Marengo, from left, Rossella Gamba and Antonio Corvino in “The Lying Life of Adults.”

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