About The Lying Life of Adults
The Lying Life of Adults (La vita bugiarda degli adulti) is a 2023 Italian coming-of-age drama, a Netflix adaptation of the novel by Elena Ferrante. Set in 1990s Naples, it follows Giovanna, a sheltered teenager from the comfortable, educated heights of the city, whose settled sense of herself begins to crack when she overhears her father compare her, cruelly, to his estranged sister. That single overheard sentence sends her searching for the aunt her parents have kept at a careful distance.
Giordana Marengo plays Giovanna, whose curiosity pulls her down the hill into the poorer, rougher Naples her family left behind, and into the orbit of the fierce, magnetic aunt Vittoria, played by Valeria Golino. Alessandro Preziosi plays Andrea, Giovanna's intellectual father, whose carefully maintained image of the perfect family starts to come apart as his daughter learns to see the adults around her clearly. As Giovanna moves between two worlds, she discovers that the grown-ups she trusted have been living behind a screen of small and large lies.
Told through Giovanna's sharpening, increasingly disillusioned gaze, the series is a portrait of adolescence as a loss of innocence, where class, family, and self-image are all revealed to be more fragile than they seemed. It is a tender and unsettling study of a girl growing up, learning the difference between the faces adults present and the truths they hide, and deciding what kind of person she wants to become.
