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| Perfect Strangers by Paolo Genovese |
Have you ever imagined dinner with friends where everybody decides to be a part of a daring game? All the guests must put their cell phones on the table and whatever message or phone call they receive, they need to pick up or read it aloud. Would you ever do it? That is the center plot of an Italian movie "Perfect Strangers" by Paolo Genovese. The intriguing moral tale for all those 24/7 obsessed with the multi-useful social media and the idea of confessing all the secrets to the tiny little thing called phone. One of the movie characters, Rocco calls a phone "our personal black box." The story in the film reveals that maybe we entrust our electronic devices a bit too much.
It is a cautionary tale for all of us sleeping, waking up next to our cell phones, having fun and daily communication mostly online. Before I decided to watch this movie, I was a bit intimidated with the possibility of another truth or dare, damaging effect of revealed secrets projected on the screen. To my utter surprise, this movie proved to be so much more. We are introduced to a group of friends who seem very close from the first sight: 3 couples and one single man, who recently got divorced and whose new love interest apparently could not attend the evening due to cold. They joke and seem very much at ease with each other. As in Italian movies, there is a fantastic food on the table, and the interiors of the hosts' apartment are stunning and so stylish. A taxi driver, plastic surgeon, therapist, PE teacher and a veterinarian are part of a colorful bouquet of professions present at the table. Guests are linked together with family ties or friendships which go back to childhood.
During a short period of time, different problems come up to surface. There are fights over teenage daughter's right to enter adulthood in a way she pleases; one couple not being really intimate with each other and fighting above their mother in law living in the same apartment; new wife wanting to have kids and the spouse not so much into it, etc. When phones start ringing, unexpected secrets come out on a surface but the tension develops slowly, and that is an interesting story-telling technique of the movie director. When dirt is revealed, friendships and understanding seems to be irrevocably lost, or maybe not? You need to watch it by yourself. When we suspect that someone in our life is not exactly honest with us, it is so tempting to check on his/her phone, and that is a road straight to emotional hell. Because either we will be proven right and that is the end of the relationship as we knew it, or we are so wrong and embarrassed by the fact that we lost faith in another person that it will also affect our perception of trust in a relationship. We should trust our intuition, shouldn't we? However, in the times when everybody has at least two cell phones, our innate instinct could be misguiding.
The director asks many fundamental questions here: How often do we lie? Is everybody living a double-life? Why do we risk something reliable and intimate over a momentary sex pleasure etc.? When I left the movie theater with my friend, we could not stop talking about it and re-imagine that kind of a situation in real life scenario. Is pure honesty always carrying some possible damage? Is it even possible for friends, partners, family members to be completely honest? I am talking here about brutal honesty; honesty, which can change things forever but at the same time is capable of refreshing some relationships' stagnation, motivate us to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.
Are we perfect strangers even when we call each other best friends? Do we really know our friends well or we just accept what we project them to be? It is not that the movie gives you answers to all those questions, but for sure it stimulates the idea of looking at things differently. Because the film is an exaggerated farce, I did not think that Perfect Strangers made me depressed or sad. Quite the contrary, it wet my appetite for re-analyzing my relationships. In my opinion, think it is an excellent psychological movie for our times with brilliant dialogues that you will never get bored of. Just watch it!
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