Netflix’s The Lying Life of Adults is not radical. It’s cliche
Hannah Rowan
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“Two years before leaving home, my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.” Giovanna almost spits the opening sentence of The Lying Life of Adults, the Netflix show based on Elena Ferrante’s latest blistering beach read.
The teenage Giovanna has begun to look like her estranged Aunt Vittoria, a spiteful woman who has refused to move past her impoverished upbringing, as Giovanna’s father Andrea, a professor, has done. The willful daughter befriends Vittoria, as much as that’s possible, and discovers the layers of deception that have ravaged the family for generations.
WHITE NOISE IS A SENTIMENTAL FARCE
Their dark secrets revolve around a bracelet, ostensibly a birthday gift for baby Giovanna, that has changed hands in too many bitter arguments to count. As she lays claim to, loses, and recovers this totem, Giovanna learns about the differences between her family’s lower-class origins and her own more auspicious start. In everything from his dialect to his approach to religion and love, her father has had to throw off his childhood.
Giovanna can’t stand the hypocrisy and betrayal that her father has engaged in to become the man who, until now, was her idol. But in her ensuing rebellious exploits, it’s often unclear whether she’s moving toward independence or recapitulating the resentments of the past. That’s adolescence.
Ferrante’s novels, set largely in her native Naples, Italy, move at the pace of a racing heartbeat. The book pounds toward a conclusion — Giovanna and a girlfriend run away to pursue writing and life and love — that could be read as a feminist middle finger to the whole rest of the story, rooted as it is in its place, its class divides, and generational ties. It would fail if Giovanna weren’t such a fierce young woman, half-formed and so headstrong that anything is believable.
The new Netflix adaptation of The Lying Life of Adults, in contrast, is believable enough to be boring. Its director, Edoardo De Angelis, said that the challenge of filming, when “imagination becomes images,” allows him to make “more radical choices” and bring out the “evocations” of Ferrante’s writing.
What he does instead is an odd echo of Andrea’s failures as a father: He offers a tolerant artistic pat on the head, portraying Giovanna’s rebellions as mere teenage phases. Instead of desperately flailing to understand and transcend the origins that could so easily determine her fate, as Ferrante’s Giovanna does, De Angelis’s heroine fearlessly conquers the rites of passage toward adulthood.
This seems less radical than it is cliche. Giovanna (the striking Giordana Marengo) gives voiceovers that are intended as bold and forceful but come across as flat and jaded. Giovanna’s mother (Pina Turco) and father (Alessandro Preziosi) seem to believe they’re acting in a soap opera, owning their status as parental villains too easily.
De Angelis takes viewers through the paces in six episodes titled to correspond with Giovanna’s revelations: Beauty, Resemblance, Bitterness, Loneliness, Love, Truth. It all feels credulous, too approving of this wild teenager acting out against her family in a way that, as adolescent quests for identity often are, is destructive as it is enlightening.
Some authors are simply hard to film. But HBO Max recently put out a bingeable series adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Ferrante’s famous tetralogy about two girls raised in working-class Naples.
In 2021, Maggie Gyllenhaal released a film adaptation of The Lost Daughter that is as painfully intimate as Ferrante’s novel. Gyllenhaal’s film works because, like Ferrante’s novel, it is utterly unforgiving — all close-ups and abrupt flashbacks, rude ripostes crashing on friendly overtures, crises rolling over charming beach scenes, heart-stopping and violent as the waves breaking on the shore.
It would be easy to say that De Angelis can’t, or doesn’t, achieve this in his version of The Lying Life of Adults because he’s a man. Ferrante, an old-school feminist, has expressed her own support for women adapting her works and making them their own, but she has had little to say about men doing so. Or one could blame the medium. The Netflix miniseries runs six hours, awkwardly between the compression of a feature-length film and the luxurious expansion of a television series.
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But Ferrante has a screenwriting credit, and she signed off on this adaptation of The Lying Life of Adults. The central failing may be more simple and more about Ferrante’s strengths than others’ mistakes. The Lying Life of Adults falters on screen because Ferrante’s brand of coming-of-age story is better imagined, or even desired, than seen.
Hannah Rowan is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C.