Elena Ferrante fans have been treated to two particularly wonderful, yet very different, screen versions of her work over the past couple of years, from Maggie Gyllenhaal’s elegant film The Lost Daughter to My Brilliant Friend, which remains one of the most stunning, if underwatched, literary adaptations of recent times. The Lying Life of Adults (Netflix) takes on Ferrante’s 2019 coming-of-age novel and, while it keeps good company, that also means it has a lot to prove. With the exception of a couple of stylistic quirks that don’t seem to belong, this energetic and charismatic six-parter mostly pulls it off with gusto.
In 1990s Naples, teenage Giovanna (a hugely impressive debut from Giordana Marengo) is bored and restless. Her parents are gorgeous, glamorous leftwing academics, while she feels like a misfit. Her grades are poor, she has little interest in anything other than novels (“I like all novels,” she tells her teacher, who points out that there is a bit more to succeeding at school than that), and, worse, she worries she is becoming ugly, having overheard her father, Andrea, expressing concerns that she is starting to look like her mysterious Aunt Vittoria, a woman evidently absent from their cosy family life. While Giovanna is so filled with teenage apathy she begins the series as a walking, barely talking shrug, Vittoria sparks her interest, and sets her off on an adventure that will explode her steady life as she knows it.
Vittoria is a fabulous creation, on the page and on the screen, where Valeria Golino has a ball with her. Vittoria is Andrea’s estranged sister, and still lives where they grew up together, on the wrong side of the tracks. Andrea decides that if his daughter is so curious about her aunt, they should be allowed to meet. The reality of her should prove more of a deterrent than the idea of her. Andrea may have improved his lot – though Giovanna bristles at what she sees as her parents’ champagne socialism – but Vittoria is earthy and crude and puts on no airs or graces. The class tensions crackle and fizz. She is proudly coarse and highly strung. She holds grudges, and blames her brother for every misfortune in her life. She smokes, swears, threatens people in her orbit with a knife; she is part Miss Havisham, part Bet Lynch, all post-watershed. Vittoria demands an impossibly delicate balance of ferocity and fragility, and Golino is immaculate in the role.
Understandably, Giovanna is entranced by her aunt, then repulsed, then entranced again. This is a side of Naples she doesn’t know – the rundown area where Vittoria lives is entirely unfamiliar, but the people, too, are a revelation to her. There are some neat contrasts drawn between her parents’ lives, with its book-lined apartments and intellectual dinner-table conversations, and the loud, tactile world, “like Naples, but another planet”, where Vittoria lives. It is thrilling and frightening, and Giovanna cannot resist it. There are hypocrisies everywhere, though, and they soon start to surface.
As always, Ferrante has impeccable insight into the complex psychology of teenage girls, and Giovanna’s attempts at self-discovery, as she tries on and discards various identities, are painfully familiar and universal, even if the Neapolitan setting may not be. She borrows Vittoria’s insults and uses them as her own, which is funny, but also serves a purpose, particularly when it comes to the persistent approaches of boys her own age. She moves away from the safety of her childhood friends and explores more dangerous territories, on a battered old Vespa. Her own family falls apart and she tries to find a new one. She must work out if she really is like her aunt, and she does so by making a series of decisions that would be inexplicable and unforgivable, were it not for the fact that she is a teenage girl, acting out, desperately in search of something.
As a series, this has a more pop sensibility than the classy cinematic refinement of My Brilliant Friend, but it suits its energy. There is a need for it to be brash and occasionally bratty. At times, it leans a bit too closely into its obnoxiousness – it repeats poetic lines of narration, adding an echoing reverb, as if inserting a ghostly chorus; the soundtrack often thunders in without much grace; and it has a recurring motif of brief moments played backwards, which offers more style than substance. There is an argument, though, that it befits the gum-popping teen insolence that runs through it. When I read The Lying Life of Adults, I thought of it as a very internal and inward-looking story, but this version breathes new life into it, turns it outwards, and adds a touch of rocket fuel.
