Perfect Strangers (Perfetti Sconosciuti) is a 2016 dramedy movie by Italian filmmaker Paolo Genovese.
The plot is as follows: while having a dinner together, a group of friends decides to do an experiment: they will put their phones on the table and make everybody else know the content of each message they are going to receive during the evening.
Things don't work out really well.
In 2019, the movie entered the Guinness Book of Records for being the film with the most remakes ever, for a total of 24, all of them being foreign remakes.
Perfetti Sconosciuti contains examples of:
- Aesop: At the end of the movie, one of the characters states the dangerousness of playing with someone else's privacy.
- A subtler one can be made for the importance of therapy and facing problems. Rocco and Lele are being thorn apart by their refuse to face their shared trauma and guilt, while Rocco had gone in therapy for six months and has become much more mature and level-headed, able to give some practical advice to his daughter and wife, and he is the one understanding the risks of the game.
- All Just a Dream: It turns out that the whole game never actually took place, the dinner went on normally, with every character keeping their secrets, for better or (mainly) worse.
- Bittersweet Ending: The game never took place, meaning that none of the discussion did, and the friendships (or marriages) didn't break up. On the other hand, it has been shown that those relationships are based on deception and very, very unhealthy. Anna in particular will keep being adoring of a husband that is cheating on her with two different women (at least).
- Closet Gay: One of the characters is homosexual and has to hide it from his friends, who are very critic about this topic.
- Did Not Think This Through: Lele suggests Peppe to swap their phones to hide the fact he gets spicy pictures from a flirt every day at 22:00. Neither of them consider the fact that he will have to deal with anything Peppe gets before they can swap it back. This backfires immediately, as Luigi (Peppe's boyfriend) texts him gradually more revealing texts.
- Foreign Remake: As stated before, many foreign remakes of the movie were made throughout the world. You can see a full list of them here
. - Foreshadowing: Before the game begins, all the characters discuss their former friend breaking his marriage due to him cheating on his wife with a younger woman. Lele and Cosimo, while sharing the common criticism at the beginning, then backpedal a bit, getting a bit defensive, with the bulk of the criticism becoming not being smart enough about it. Both of them turn out to be cheating on their wives.
- Cosimo has a small pause after Bianca says she is stopping taking birth control, before expressing his happiness about it. It turns out he is having unprotected sex with one of his lovers, and he and the audience will find out at the same time that she did get pregnant from it.
- Hypocrite: Every character shows his share of hypocrisy as the messages he receives are made public to others.
- All the cheating characters get extremely angry when they suspect (rightfully or not) that their partners are cheating on them as well.
- Heel Realization: When Lele has to pretend to be the one getting texts from Lucio, he comes to realize how homophobic he and his friends (and wives) actually are. When Rocco asks Peppe why he didn't tell them, Lele answers for him by pointing out how they treated him those two hours.
- Irony: Rocco is the one who votes against the game. As the movie shows, he would have been the one less damaged by it.
- Cosimo manages to dodge all the calls and texts from Marika through the evening, passing her as just a coworker, until the call from his jeweler, which asks about a ring and earrings his wife did not get, which causes them to get suspicious and make him call Marika, who reveals that she is her (pregnant) lover. The irony comes from the fact that the jewels weren't even for Marika, but for Eva, with whom he also has an affair (and who didn't know about Marika), and that affair doesn't get exposed.
- Manipulative Bastard: Cosimo turns out to be one. Despite getting texts from (one of) his lover(s) from the very beginning, he is able to pass them as messages from a coworker, managing to get all the others to agree to ignore them and not call her, effectively side-stepping the rules of the game. He would have even gotten away with it, if not for a call from the jeweler.
- Nice Guy: Peppe, Rocco and Cosimo are established as such. By the end of the movie, only Peppe proves to actually be one: Rocco is getting there, but has still room to improve, like examining his homophobic bias, while Cosimo is by far the worst person there, being a huge homophobe and a serial adulterer.
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Retroactive Recognition: Far from being his first role, this is one year before Edoardo Leo's Star-Making Role in Smetto Quando Voglio. - Rewatch Bonus: Cosimo's panicked reaction when he receives the fake text from Rocco makes more sense knowing of his multiple lovers. All of his reactions to Marika's text also get under a different light.
- You Keep Using That Word: Like many Italian products, the movie uses "outing" (forcibly revealing someone's sexuality against their will) instead of "coming out" (willingly revealing your own).
- Your Cheating Heart: The plot is started when the group discusses one of their former friends had been found out cheating on his wife. Turns out that, of the eight main characters, only Rocco, Bianca and Peppe aren't cheating on their partners. Cosimo is the worst, cheating on his lover as well, and having gotten one of the women pregnant.
