Since we can't reply to each other, i'm writing a review i might not have written because i just finished watching Ep. 6 and i haven't fully digested it yet but to address one question I can answer.
One commenter wished that we'd known what year the story took place. Actually we do but it requires doing some quick math in the scene where Vittoria takes Giovanna to Enzo's grave - it is late 1995 at that point - and thus 1996 in the later episodes after the story skips ahead about 9 or 10 months.
It was hard to like a lot of the characters (which inherently limits my degree of engagement in a story - i was far more committed emotionally to Ferrante's "My Brilliant Friend" especially Season 1 when we got to know the leads as children with superb child actresses playing them).
But what makes them unlikeable here seems to have been key to the central theme as Giovanna (also superb in her first-ever film) begins from a place of hurt in the opening scene - overhearing her father say she's become ugly and reminds him of his "monstrous" estranged sister. She'd grown up adoring her father, and this was a brutal haunting stab. When her parents learn that she's heard that comment, they "walk it back" in what will become a litany of adult coverups, obfuscations, lies, hypocrisies and secrets that she scrutinizes in search of both truth and of what it seems to mean to be an adult.
She sees falsity, hypocrisy, betrayal, so many kinds of lies that she is soon swimming in them. At the same time, at age 15, she's confronting the paternalistic, crude macho misogynies and presumptuous disrespect for women as objects surrounding her as if to suffocate her at times, and she's continually having to slap them off. We do feel the full injustice of why a young woman should have to endure such indignities - and, to use Vittoria's word for it, being seen as "meat" - when it's already a full-time job trying to process all the lies. Plenty to make her angry and confused on at least two fronts.
And there's a convention since earliest novels, a kind of leitmotif, that threads through the story - a reappearing object that soon epitomizes this broader theme: it's a sumptuous bracelet around which so much 'violation' has occurred - theft, lies, secrets, betrayals - and in which Giovanna is implicated as are most of the central characters eventually. Learning the truth of the bracelet - its history/chain-of-custody and the emotions it evokes for each - becomes a symbolic quest within Giovanna's larger struggle to understand. The ultimate truth of the bracelet and of so much hidden family life, swept under a rug of lies, is at the heart of her loss of innocence that we walk (or motorcycle) through with Giovanna. It certainly doesn't make the rite of passage that is adolescence look any more likeable than are most of the characters.
P.s. There's a sort of 'epilogue' that comes after a moment I thought was going to be the series ending (which would have perhaps put too much of a bow on the finale, as Vittoria admits her lies and explains that she told them because "they were beautiful"). But I guess the point was to have us see a glimpse into Giovanna's lessons-taken from all her detective-like scrutiny of adult rationales, one of which is to take the reins as the master of her own fate, ever on guard against being used or taken lightly.
To adapt another Italian's mantra, her increasingly bold, defined choices in the epilogue suggest she's vowed to "do it her way."
One commenter wished that we'd known what year the story took place. Actually we do but it requires doing some quick math in the scene where Vittoria takes Giovanna to Enzo's grave - it is late 1995 at that point - and thus 1996 in the later episodes after the story skips ahead about 9 or 10 months.
It was hard to like a lot of the characters (which inherently limits my degree of engagement in a story - i was far more committed emotionally to Ferrante's "My Brilliant Friend" especially Season 1 when we got to know the leads as children with superb child actresses playing them).
But what makes them unlikeable here seems to have been key to the central theme as Giovanna (also superb in her first-ever film) begins from a place of hurt in the opening scene - overhearing her father say she's become ugly and reminds him of his "monstrous" estranged sister. She'd grown up adoring her father, and this was a brutal haunting stab. When her parents learn that she's heard that comment, they "walk it back" in what will become a litany of adult coverups, obfuscations, lies, hypocrisies and secrets that she scrutinizes in search of both truth and of what it seems to mean to be an adult.
She sees falsity, hypocrisy, betrayal, so many kinds of lies that she is soon swimming in them. At the same time, at age 15, she's confronting the paternalistic, crude macho misogynies and presumptuous disrespect for women as objects surrounding her as if to suffocate her at times, and she's continually having to slap them off. We do feel the full injustice of why a young woman should have to endure such indignities - and, to use Vittoria's word for it, being seen as "meat" - when it's already a full-time job trying to process all the lies. Plenty to make her angry and confused on at least two fronts.
And there's a convention since earliest novels, a kind of leitmotif, that threads through the story - a reappearing object that soon epitomizes this broader theme: it's a sumptuous bracelet around which so much 'violation' has occurred - theft, lies, secrets, betrayals - and in which Giovanna is implicated as are most of the central characters eventually. Learning the truth of the bracelet - its history/chain-of-custody and the emotions it evokes for each - becomes a symbolic quest within Giovanna's larger struggle to understand. The ultimate truth of the bracelet and of so much hidden family life, swept under a rug of lies, is at the heart of her loss of innocence that we walk (or motorcycle) through with Giovanna. It certainly doesn't make the rite of passage that is adolescence look any more likeable than are most of the characters.
P.s. There's a sort of 'epilogue' that comes after a moment I thought was going to be the series ending (which would have perhaps put too much of a bow on the finale, as Vittoria admits her lies and explains that she told them because "they were beautiful"). But I guess the point was to have us see a glimpse into Giovanna's lessons-taken from all her detective-like scrutiny of adult rationales, one of which is to take the reins as the master of her own fate, ever on guard against being used or taken lightly.
To adapt another Italian's mantra, her increasingly bold, defined choices in the epilogue suggest she's vowed to "do it her way."