Reviews of the Netflix series ‘The lying life of adults’

“When you’re little, everything seems big. When you’re big, everything seems small. To each his own.” This spell begins each episode of The lying life of adults. This somewhat eccentric Italian series follows the life of fifteen-year-old Giovanna, who cannot accept that the lives of the adults around her seem to be connected with lies, as the title suggests.

Already in the first episode, Giovanna goes in search of her aunt, with whom her father has not had contact for years. Her aunt Vittoria lives in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples and is determined to tell Giovanna all about the fights that have separated the family for years. Episode two features a bracelet that is supposed to find its way through history as a red thread.

However, its implementation is poor. The bracelet appears in different places and is always named literally, whereas it could have given more tension and depth to the series if this bracelet had always been visible without naming it. This would have kept the viewer on their toes and allowed them to draw their own conclusions, which would later turn out to be incorrect. So it’s not a surprise at all.

This is not the only stitch manufacturers drop. Occasionally the main character will speak through a voiceover, but that only happens once per episode. Too little to maintain a constant line and structure in this. Each time this voice can be heard again, it provides some recognition, but it is not a concrete narrative. Therefore, the creators don’t seem to really know which way they wanted to go with the structure of the series.

There’s also a lot to be said for style and dirt. For example, there is a scene where Giovanna plays the young Vittoria. Of course it’s nice that Giovanna looks like the younger version of her aunt, but it seems like no effort has been made to change her appearance. At first this causes confusion, because as a viewer you don’t know who you’re really looking at.

Also, the choice of music is unoriginal. What is All That She Wants from Ace of Base doing in this series? Only the literal translation of the text can somewhat justify this choice. And Bella Ciao seems to have been included as well because this song did well on The Money Heist.

We can go on like this for a while. The moral of the story is quite interesting, but a lot more could have been made of it. By not literally chewing everything and presenting the story as a coherent whole (everything is going pretty well now). The lying life of adults it could have been an exciting series that could have caught the attention of the viewer. But unfortunately it was not so.

★★☆☆☆

The lying life of adults can be seen in Netflix.