The Italian-language Netflix Original series The Lying Lives of Adults, based on Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same name, is all about love, deceit, and sex. Six episodes, starring Giordana Marengo as Giovanna, take the audience through a family in disarray and a teenager caught between two worlds. However, it falls short of satisfying any of these throughlines in the end.
Giovanna is a bright child who struggles at school. She’s an iconoclast whose personality is difficult to distinguish between self-aware sarcasm and a real desire to stand apart in clothes and style. Her parents are well-off liberal academics who intend well, but her father starts portraying Giovanna as growing to look too much like her estranged aunt Vittoria (Valeria Golino). She first believes that this implies she is becoming physically unattractive. But as Giovanna inquires about her aunt and her father’s connection with her, she realizes the likeness is far more about their personalities. Vittoria lives in an impoverished neighborhood and approaches life, politics, and relationships differently from Giovanna’s parents.
When Giovanna first meets Vittoria, two things stick with her: she has to have wonderful sex as quickly as possible, and grownups are all liars; all you have to do is search for their tells. As Giovanna discovers her parents’ falsehoods, she begins to distance herself from their world and her friends inside it in exchange for time and connections with her newfound family and their social circles. Of course, everything finally comes to a head, resulting in some major family turmoil.
When Giovanna first meets Vittoria, two things stick with her: she has to have wonderful sex as quickly as possible, and grownups are all liars; all you have to do is search for their tells. As Giovanna discovers her parents’ falsehoods, she begins to distance herself from their world and her friends inside it in exchange for time and connections with her newfound family and their social circles. Of course, everything finally comes to a head, resulting in some major family turmoil.
Some amazing 90s costuming, music, and setting help to ease this often tight performance. I was amazed by Marengo’s ability to switch between profound emotion and deadpan in her acting debut, particularly the latter. It’s also finely written, with a slew of conversation sequences that flesh out Giovanna and Vittora while making their actual selves increasingly difficult to recognize.
You get a lot of different variations of each character when they try on or expose different skins, and each iteration is executed with a lot of energy. While all of The Lying Lives of Adults’ approaches to love, lying, and sex are excellent, I don’t feel like they’re all equally and thoroughly expanded upon.
When Giovanna’s family is threatened by adultery, the program does a good job of addressing the idea that love does not always look the way we expect it to. But there’s so much well-acted anger that, in the end, I get the impression that the program is advocating a conviction that love is futile in its fickleness. In the program, love is continually shown literally, whether through a family relic transferred between women as a metaphor for dominance over one another or through ambiguous messages about whether love requires the actual body of another to materialize.
The falsehoods are typically effectively depicted. The falsehoods that grownups tell each other make for fantastic drama. The narrator is untrustworthy since he only follows Giovanna, making it impossible to know whether or not adults are lying. But, after a certain point, Giovanna becomes an accomplished liar herself, becoming very hard to read emotionally. But, after beginning with a sequence that is replayed out of order to underline what truly happened vs the version Giovanna told her father, the show never uses the same method again.
The closest thing to that is a late-series disclosure about Giovanna’s parents and their friends, which seems less dramatic than I believe the producers expected considering how much it was telegraphed. Or it was telegraphed on purpose but just didn’t come up until that episode, in which case the authors weren’t lying to the viewers as I suspected, but instead just fell short in completely describing the parents from the start. I was initially interested in the falsehoods and lack of dependable narrative, but towards the end, everything simply seemed like a malaise of dishonesty to the point where I didn’t care if it was real or not.
The sex of it all is also rough. To begin, you must disregard the fact that the age of consent in Italy is substantially lower than in the United States, and you must accept some discomfort over the age gaps I presume exist between some characters. While parts of Giovanna’s relationships and lusts wonderfully match the uncomfortable teenage experience of having first sexual interactions with terrible guys and just as well fulfill her awakening to sexual self-empowerment, there’s a large queer question mark that isn’t done justice for me.
Also read: Spoiler Alert: A love story in all of its beauty and rough edges
A quick glimpse into Giovanna’s relationship with her closest friend reveals that they presumably kiss frequently, and her best friend’s sister appears to be uncomfortable about this. This isn’t touched again until the very end, in a way that feels completely unexpected and only a dissatisfying reference to a broader theme discussed in the source material. Where the program decides to be subtle about queerness or non-heterosexual sex, it misses a chance to tie each of the issues of love, lies, and sex with a better knot. Instead, it’s a strange half-hearted finale that left me wondering what Giovanna had learned along her journey, and thus, what I was supposed to take away as well.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m left with some nice questions to think about. Just not as many satisfactory responses as I believe the show might have provided.
The Lying Lives of Adults presents some opposed opinions on love, lying, and sex from people whose frequently unexpected responses are ill-equipped to be shared. Its lead actress carries a lot of weight and will make you think hard. You just won’t get as many answers as you’d want.
The Lying Lives of Adults is now available on Netflix. fascinating enough to justify a whole watch.
