Writers are Elena Ferrante (from her novel), Francesco Piccolo, Laura Paulucci and Severio Costanzo.
We open as Elena (Alba Rohrwacher) is making a hash of her life. She hasn't been with her children for two years yet wants to make a future with them in Napoli with Nico (fabrizio Gifuni) - only she's unaware he hasn't left his wife - it takes Lila (Irene Maiorino) to tell her. As it (slowly) progresses, she's so stupid she knows she's fallen out of love with him but is still paralysed by indecision even when she catches him fucking the maid. Again, Lila has to tell her Nico's been coming on to her at every opportunity he's had.
That apartment with the view over the Bay of Napoli must have cost a fortune even then.
It's a bit of a downbeat slog. And I was reading Richard Osmon talking about the filming of 'The Thursday Murder Club' and he was expecting the film to be different otherwise it would be "nine hours of every single line of dialogue and every single internal monologue... The world's most boring film." (Which was also I guess the fate that befell Greed). And I think that's the problem here - so reverential are the producers to Elena Ferrante's novels that they film everything in great overlength resulting in a ten hour version - just what Osman was talking about. There's a happy medium when you consider Any Human Heart - the absolutely best adaptation of a William Boyd novel, a novel that is packed with incident over a character's whole life - that's still only four and a half hours.
It's also quite difficult to like anyone in it.
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