"The Lying Life of Adults," the latest novel by the famously pseudonymous Italian writer Elena Ferrante, has been adapted — one might say inevitably — for the screen as a six-part Netflix series. It follows HBO's lauded and ongoing "My Brilliant Friend," based on Ferrante's "Neapolitan" tetralogy, and three books turned into theatrical features, including last year's "The Lost Daughter," directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. (One can easily imagine that some studio holds an option on whatever Ferrante is thinking right this second.) Her 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, if not necessarily in the way you might have pictured them. (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 — viewers not ready to leave Italy after "The White Lotus" may want to extend their stay here — and striking central performances by Giordana Marengo as main character and narrator Giovanna Trada, and Valeria Golina as her aunt Vittoria.
Most of the action is set among three distinct Naples neighborhoods: 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, and Naples itself is portrayed as a place to get away from.
