The teenage Giovanna has begun to look like her estranged Aunt Vittoria, a spiteful woman who has refused to move past her impoverished upbringing, as Giovanna’s father Andrea, a professor, has done. The willful daughter befriends Vittoria, as much as that’s possible, and discovers the layers of deception that have ravaged the family for generations.
Ferrante’s novels, set largely in her native Naples, Italy, move at the pace of a racing heartbeat. The book pounds toward a conclusion — Giovanna and a girlfriend run away to pursue writing and life and love — that could be read as a feminist middle finger to the whole rest of the story, rooted as it is in its place, its class divides, and generational ties. It would fail if Giovanna weren’t such a fierce young woman, half-formed and so headstrong that anything is believable.
What he does instead is an odd echo of Andrea’s failures as a father: He offers a tolerant artistic pat on the head, portraying Giovanna’s rebellions as mere teenage phases. Instead of desperately flailing to understand and transcend the origins that could so easily determine her fate, as Ferrante’s Giovanna does, De Angelis’s heroine fearlessly conquers the rites of passage toward adulthood.
De Angelis takes viewers through the paces in six episodes titled to correspond with Giovanna’s revelations: Beauty, Resemblance, Bitterness, Loneliness, Love, Truth. It all feels credulous, too approving of this wild teenager acting out against her family in a way that, as adolescent quests for identity often are, is destructive as it is enlightening.
Everything we think is special about our pathetic lives is cliche as hell