On January 4, the lying life of adults arrives on Netflix , a new series in six episodes produced by Fandango and based on the novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante .
You can find our review HERE
Written by Elena Ferrante, Laura Paolucci, Francesco Piccolo and Edoardo De Angelis and directed by Edoardo De Angelis , the series is a powerful and unique portrait of Giovanna’s transition from childhood to adolescence in the 1990s. The search for a new face, after the happy one of childhood, oscillates between two consanguineous Naples who however fear and hate each other: the Naples above, which has given itself a fine mask, and the one below, which pretends to be immoderate , trivial. Giovanna fluctuates between high and low, now falling now climbing up, disoriented by the fact that, up or down, the city seems unanswerable and without a way out.
The trailer
Now we know better the cast and the characters of the series
JOHN (Giordana Marengo)
Giovanna is a teenager from the 90s in search of her own identity. Short hair, piercing eyes and an aggressive look, she is grunge. “She’s putting on Victoria’s face,” her mother says to her father at the beginning of the story. And perhaps it is true, if she at fifteen, she grew up in the upper world of Naples well, she is becoming ugly and bad like the unmentionable aunt with whom the Trada family hasn’t spoken for years. Giovanna reads a lot, she loves novels, she is smart, intelligent, capable, but she does badly at school; at home, with her former parents so loved, after what she has heard them say, it is a daily battle – and what better act of rebellion against a family of teachers than to fail?
Giovanna is a little girl who is becoming a woman, but already inside the prosperous body of a female who incites the indiscreet male attentions. Giovanna is changing, she feels it. It is therefore her to find herself, to understand that she really has her face, that she convinces her father to let her visit her aunt. The meeting with Vittoria, who looks a lot like her and in which she can’t help but reflect herself, opens her eyes: she will discover unspeakable secrets about her parents and their past, she will learn to lie like adults, to talk like her aunt, and like Vittoria to open up to love and sex.
VICTORY (Valeria Golino)
Giovanna’s aunt, Andrea’s sister. Vittoria is a storm, prosperous and wild, foul-mouthed, cheeky, intolerant and ironic, unfriendly but in her loving way. She is an avid smoker, she wears a lot of make-up, wears tight-fitting and gaudy clothes. Vittoria – practicing Catholic, middle school, service woman – has a tragic love in her past, her only great love, Enzo. In Giovanna’s family, her aunt is a fuzzy figure, a very precise rectangle to erase the face on an old photograph, a mysterious and witchlike being who wreaks havoc, who cannot be named at home and which for this reason ignites her niece’s imagination. Vittoria loves Giovanna, but the two have a conflicting relationship. It will be thanks to her that he will discover the true nature of adults: they are all liars… even her.
ANDREA (Alessandro Preziosi)
Father of Giovanna, husband of Nella and brother of Vittoria. Andrea, with pomaded hair and a cigar in his mouth, is a highly cultured intellectual, a communist, a respected teacher from Vomero who writes articles for L’Unità di Napoli. On the surface, he might seem like a kind, cheerful man, a husband in love, a faithful friend, an affectionate father, and maybe he was, but since Vittoria advised Giovanna to look carefully at her parents, “because otherwise you wouldn’t save”, she realized who she really is: a licensed liar, a traitor. Andrea is a man who never looks you in the eye, capable of sudden outbursts of anger, who, unlike Roberto, is ashamed of the misery of the Pascone where he grew up. It is perhaps for this reason that he has cut off all relations with Vittoria, because he reminds him where he comes from.
NELLA (Pina Turco)
Mother of Giovanna and wife of Andrea. She too, like her husband, is a respected teacher who earns money by translating foreign novels. Andrea is her light, she loves his intelligence, his culture, the courage that allowed him to emancipate himself from the misery of the neighborhood where he grew up. Nella is an attentive and understanding mother of hers, who however is no longer able to understand her daughter, her obsession with Vittoria, who for her is a lying and envious monster, who has done everything to hinder the husband’s accession.
MARIANO (Biagio Forestieri)
Constance’s husband, he is Andrea’s best friend – the two have known each other since university – with whom he is able to discuss literature and politics for hours. Cultured and foul-mouthed, he is also a good Naples professor. Secular, liberal, progressive, communist: these are the values with which he raised his daughters. Round glasses and thick moustache, he is the one who allows himself to use the dialect most often in the group of friends.
CONSTANCE (Raffaella Rea)
Wife of Mariano, mother of Angela and Ida, sole heir of a very rich Neapolitan family who left her the stupendous villa overlooking the sea in Posillipo, where she lives with her family. Costanza is a refined, elegant, measured woman with an elegant bearing, always well dressed, made up and coiffed.
ANGELA (Rossella Gamba)
The eldest daughter of Mariano and Costanza. Giovanna’s age and her best friend, they have known each other since childhood. Angela is beautiful, feminine, elegant like her mother. She admires her friend very much, so much so that from an early age if there was one thing that interested Giovanna she must have suffered it too. Because, in reality, what Angela really feels for her friend is a strong attraction to her…
IDA (Azure Mennella)
Angela’s younger sister. Ida is the good daughter of bourgeois parents; during the series, however, just like Giovanna, she will come into conflict with them. She is a voracious reader, she spends her time writing in her diary, everything that happens to her becomes a story to tell, or to put into verse, which, despite her young age, is already receiving good acclaim. Although she sometimes feels excluded from the bond that unites her sister and Giovanna, perhaps she is the only one who truly understands her.
MARGHERITA (Susy Del Giudice)
The mother of Corrado, Tonino and Giuliana, wife of Enzo, marshal of public security, the tragic love of Vittoria. Discovering her husband’s betrayal after Andrea’s tip, Margherita forced Enzo to break off the adulterous relationship. However, when he fell ill shortly after her, including the sincere and overwhelming nature of her feeling for Vittoria, he allowed her to look after him with her in the last days of her life. Since then, the two women have been inseparable, they live next door, Vittoria has become the other mother of her children. Observing them well, however, we immediately notice how Margherita is dominated by her friend.
CORRADO (Giuseppe Brunetti)
Corrado is the most outgoing of the three brothers, the one who physically and temperamentally resembles his father Enzo the most. Corrado is a big kid who plays guappo, frequents the bad rounds of his friend Rosario who dominates the neighborhood, but in reality he is a PIB, a “fish in broth”. He falls in love with Giovanna from the first meeting, which becomes almost an obsession for him. Roberto is his nemesis, perhaps because in him he sees emancipation from that miserable life that he hasn’t been able to and will never be able to obtain.
TONINO (Gianluca Spagnoli)
Tonino is handsome, he exudes strength, but he is very shy, even if capable of outbursts of anger that transfigure him. He is the most sensitive of the three brothers: for Vittoria he nurtures a sort of intimidated devotion. He is a close friend of Roberto. For Tonino, Naples has become a dead end, where serious people like him are looked at with suspicion, that’s why he would like to leave, if he stayed he would waste his life.
GIULIANA (Maria Vera Ratti)
Enchanting, with those large clear eyes of hers, the lean and slender figure. She is the sister of Tonino and Corrado, she is Roberto’s girlfriend, whom she loves madly and who changed his life, removing her from the misery in which she was destined to stagnate. And if he now pushes her away, if he changes his mind about their relationship, she’ll feel lost. For this reason she is jealous to the point of neurosis of all the women who buzz around him in Milan, like Michela, the boy’s university colleague, witty and intelligent as Giuliana she thinks she will never be.
ROBERTO (Giuseppe Buselli)
Young Catholic area ideologue. Born and raised in Pascone, he moved to Milan for years, where he teaches at the university. Considered among the most promising theologians of his generation, he made study and his eloquence a means of social redemption. Roberto has the intelligence and beauty of faith, he becomes fervent when he discusses it, with his clear eyes and blond curls that make him look like one of the archangels of the Gospels that he studies.
ROSARY (Adriano Pantaleo)
Son of the lawyer Sergente, powerful and feared racketeer. Protected by the name he bears, he feels like the boss of the Pianto, he thinks he can do and get everything he wants, even Giovanna, with whom he falls in love. Rosario, his teeth protruding a lot, his expression fixed in an arrogant grin, darts by in a yellow Ferrari, shows off very expensive watches and with his thugs, which also includes Corrado, makes good and bad weather in the neighborhood.