Deceitful Love Review 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Gabriella (Monica Guerritore) is the owner of a hotel overlooking the ocean, and we first see her getting fitted for a wedding dress, with her daughter Guilia (Dharma Mangia Woods) reassuring her that she is deserving of being pampered for this wedding, just like a younger bride might. But when her credit cards are blocked, she goes to the office of her oldest son, Stefano (Emanuel Caserio), who tells her that he’s freezing her assets while the legal proceedings for “exploitation of a vulnerable adult” move forward.
A few months earlier, the very elegant Gabriella has her family over to her private apartment at the hotel for her 60th birthday. What she notices when she looks out over the water, though, is a young man getting naked and diving off a pier.
After a dissatisfying visit from her adult sons — she has a teenage son, Nico (Francesco Del Gaudio) that lives with her — she’s out for a walk when she sees that young man, Elia (Giacomo Gianniotti), with his disabled car. She offers him her phone and a place to get in out of the rain. Right away, there’s a spark between the two, something that Gabriella doesn’t quite buy into because the two of them are so far apart in age. She lets him borrow her youngest son’s Sex Pistols t-shirt.
Of course, earlier, Nico happened to run into Elia at a bar, and asks him about the shirt, not knowing it’s his. Elia doesn’t know who Nico is either, and kisses him in answer to a dare the Nico’s friends issue to him.
During another walk, Gabriella sees Elia arguing with the mechanic fixing his car. That encounter ends in a passionate kiss. Then Elia, ever the free spirit, goes further when he pulls her into a neighbor’s pool when they look for her dog.
He’s certainly mysterious, living on a boat he bought the day he came to the coast. And as much as Gabriella denies his attention, she is also feeling like an object of desire for the first time in a long time. But after a number of trysts, she introduces Elia to her family; immediately, Stefano doesn’t trust Elia’s motives.
Deceitful Love has lots of sex, lots of foreboding music, and lots of overdramatic performances. Is it good drama? Not really. It’s a series about a woman who is finding her sexual self come back in force due to the attention of this mysterious younger man, the family who doesn’t approve of the relationship, and the man himself, whom nobody knows much about.
It doesn’t feel like the show is all that complex, does it? There will likely be a lot of scenes of Gabriella getting railed by Elia, some arguments between Gabriella and Elia, then Gabriella and her kids, scenes of Stefano looking into who Elia is — more on that in a bit — and other soapy asides that don’t really contribute much to the story. Nico, the youngest, has identity issues, and Guilia, the middle child, keeps getting cosmetic surgeries for amorphous reasons. Do we care about them? Nah, not all that much.
Of course, we’re all for seeing a woman in her sixties getting it on with a much younger man, because we really don’t see a lot of that, and Guerritore isn’t afraid of literally exposing herself to the cameras to make the story feel more realistic. It helps that she gives Gabriella a sexy confidence that seems to belie her belief that she’ll never fall in lust with anyone again.
The rest of the cast, including Gianniotti as Elia, we can take or leave. So much of the show is full of over-the-top melodrama that we were basically waiting for the next elegantly-shot sex scene and not really buying into the predictable story in between those scenes.
