“The lying life of adults”, Naples looks in the mirror in a beautiful series with a single flaw (score 7) – Corriere.it

The true saga of Elena Ferrante’s novels continues for the large television audience who thus also discover young faces of actresses. After the debut with “L’amore molesto” by Martone, after the happy seasons of “Amica geniale” (with two very good interpreters, Mazzucco has already been seen elsewhere) after the English film set in Greece without any particle of Neapolitanism in the soul, here on Netflix, with good success, six episodes of the book “The lying life of adults”, published as always by e/o.

And still a glimpse of Naples but in the 90s no longer in the flashback of the 50s and 60s, a Naples that lives twice, which goes from Vomero to Posillipo and where the portrait of the protagonist has almost a double meaning: Giovanna passes from childhood to adolescence, always in a familiar reference wanted with his aunt Giovanna whose spirit he seems to have inherited. Family vendettas, phrases heard at the door with her father who, speaking to her mother, speaks ill of her sister and fears that her daughter might look like her. And here is a double story: the bourgeois city of the left-wing university professor’s family who has no problem cheating on his wife (and vice versa) and the proletarian city, low-lying where the destinies of Aunt Vittoria intertwine with those of her niece, forming an inextricable tangle of feelings that lives in the episodes of the maxi family history.

Where yes, adults have no trouble lying and the progressive father proves weak with his life even though there was then still the lifeline of a supportive party on the left. Of course, for a director like 44-year-old Edoardo De Angelis, a real Neapolitan, directing the beautiful series produced by Fandango was like reliving childhood and youth, once again stepping on the same physical and moral pavements. In recent years, De Angelis has directed in the cinema some of the films most profoundly linked to the city, to its spirit, even to its being trashy (The indivisibles), atrociously without a future in the gaze (“The vice of hope”). But then he also came to face (a solid refuge) some of De Filippo’s classics (“Natale in casa Cupiello”, “Non ti pago” and also “Saturday, Sunday and Monday”): now he throws himself into the almost contemporary dialectic Ferrante, writing the screenplay with her, Piccolo, Laura Paolucci.

It is above all a mirror between bourgeois Naples of Vomero and the proletarian and popular one, therefore always upside down as the protagonist of this unfortunate family chronicle which in the end has neither winners nor losers. It ends only with a plea deal towards the stages of life, after the girl (immediately complimented to Giordana Marengo, chosen from 3000 candidates, for her not too visceral adhesion and her 100 days of shooting) met her famous aunt, had the famous bracelet, he even met Milan. The away part is the least happy both for the geographical solutions (immediately close to the station the unmistakable cloister of the State University disguised here as a Catholic because the intellectual comes from there) and for the psychological repercussions within the story and the the end is that of the difficult search for an identity after the happy age of innocence.

An identity that stands in the middle of the city above and below and also to two philosophies of life, which basically are also heirs of Eduardo’s comedies that tell the story of the petty bourgeoisie: both Alessandro Preziosi who plays with his measure on the cultural antipathy of his father, and Pina Turco the mother are very good who suffers but also attacks. Valeria Golino tackles the character of the aunt, controversial and mysterious, in a great way, as a shaman, making her a city witch but also a woman who keeps inside many unresolved whys. The series has a beautiful naturalness, which fades a little in the finale, but only a not insignificant flaw: the direct capture of the voices often makes the dialogue difficult to understand, not to mention the endings of the speeches, always whispered, often to be heard twice and this is the only duplicity that really bothers.