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Director Zeffirelli must be quite pleased with having created a film that gets such strong reactions. Look at all those "ones" and "twos" coexisting with so many "nines" and "tens"!

The story ticks people off because it touches home: a teen romance that seems ridiculous to outsiders and absolutely addictive to those living it.

Of course it is irritating to many who see right through the lying psychopath boy character and are furious that the naive girl still falls for him... but that is often how teen romances go. By the way, they can work the same way with reverse gender roles: naive teen boys falling fir manipulative girls.

The story makes us angry because it taps into the naivety we once had (or still do) and that we hate to see in ourselves and in others.

We reject it and call it absurd... yet we still idolize many manipulators in politics, businesses and entertainment, just as naively as the teen girl in EL... and that makes us hate the film even more.

Hats off to Zeffirelli!

The second season has just come out and it is just as good (production, writing, directing, acting), if not better, compared to the first.

They say that it is "loosely based" on real events. In fact, it is a very realistic telling of what happened in Brazil from 2013 to 2016. It is so realistic that pundits immediately react to it issuing denials and critical opinions... people forget that it's a work of fiction; they treat it as if it was a news piece.

Kudos to José Padilha (producer) and the great team he put together to make this series. I only wish there would be a Season 3, to continue telling the story beyond 2016... But maybe that's a different TV series altogether.