Variety – The pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante’s appeal to television producers remains as clear as the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sun-kissed Italian locations; prominent female leads, afforded greater agency than the Italian media have traditionally afforded their women; material that’s genre-adjacent, but open to more emotion than genre mechanics typically allow. As HBO’s much-lauded ‘My Brilliant Friend’ — three seasons in, headed for a fourth — has demonstrated, Ferrante’s flinty prose excavates not just time and place, but class and attitudes. That these projects function as deluxe soap is down to the abrasive element of social history salted into their fragrance and colouring: To wallow in these texts is to better understand how Italians used to live.
Netflix’s new six-part adaptation of Ferrante’s “The Lying Life of Adults” is framed as the coming-of-age of a sleuthy heroine; the mystery she stumbles into concerns her own extended family. When we meet Giovanna (Giordana Marengo), she’s much like any other bourgeois teen bouncing around Naples in the early 1990s: sensitive about her tomboyish appearance, but busy enough with the usual rounds of studies, gigs and familial obligations. It’s during the latter that she becomes aware of the volcanic faultline in her clan, separating her tweedy academic father Andrea (Alessandro Preziosi) from his defiantly proletarian sister Vittoria. Given that Vittoria’s played by Valeria Golino, introduced blasting Edith Piaf from her balcony, you’d be right to assume she’s the pivotal presence here.
“The Lying Life of Adults” streams on Netflix from January 4; all six episodes were screened for review.
