As much as we loved the adaptation on Canal + of Elena Ferrante’s fantastic tetralogy “The Prodigious Friend”, as much as that of “The Lying Life of Adults”, launched on Netflix this Thursday, leaves us hungry. Very faithful to the novel by the Italian author, who was one of the big hit of the year 2020, with sales exceeding 160,000 copies, the six-episode series dragged on. We are too often bored and we do not find the fervor of the book. It would undoubtedly have deserved to be adapted into a single feature film.
When Giovanna, an only daughter who lives a happy and privileged childhood on the heights of Naples, hears her father telling her mother that their child is ugly and looks like her sister Vittoria, her life suddenly changes into adolescence. A word that is all the more hurtful and traumatic in that the aunt, hated for obscure reasons, lives in the popular suburbs of the city, in an apartment that seems sordid.
Collapsed, the girl has only one idea in mind: to meet this poor woman, scratched from the family photo albums and whom her parents speak of as a monstrous being, who defiles and infects anyone who touches her. Using lies, skipping class, Giovanna, very aptly played by the young Giordana Marengo, ends up finding her. She immediately idealizes this loud, vulgar and beautiful woman, who talks to her without taboo about sex, life and the dark side of her family. With her, the young girl discovers the Catholic faith, banished by her intellectual parents.
An initiatory journey between hope and disillusionment
As in Elena Ferrante’s book, the series recounts the initiatory journey of a young girl who, at the beginning of the 1990s, between hope and disillusionment, drags her discomfort and violently opens the doors of adolescence. Driven to rebellion by a dented aunt, she finds herself torn between two Naples who despise each other and whom she will seek to reconcile.
Despite a nice cast carried in particular by Valeria Golino, who plays Aunt Vittoria, as well as Alessandro Preziosi and Pina Turco in the role of parents, the scenes stretch into the Neapolitan night. Others, fortunately, touch by their accuracy, in particular those which depict the ill-being of the teenager and her thwarted loves. The social geography between bourgeois and working-class neighborhoods, dear to the Italian writer, is also very well filmed.
For fans ofElena Ferrantegood news, season 4 of “The Prodigious Friend” is expected this year on Canal +.
« The lying life of adults », by Edoardo De Angelis, with Giordana Marengo, Valeria Golino, Alessandro Preziosi… On Netflix. (Six episodes).