Perfect Strangers: Why does it have the remake record?

Perfect Strangers

Perfect Strangers by Paolo Genovese can boast this unique and enviable record in the history of cinema: it is the film with the most remakes ever. Something that has been achieved progressively, but which has had a unique acceleration in recent years. But why was this comedy, apparently typically inserted within our specific tradition, so much appreciated abroad, as to become a sort of model without imitation?

The answer is perhaps very particular and for once we can say that it makes us understand how, from certain points of view, perhaps Italian cinema is not all that isolated in the international film scene.

A comedy with a universal message?

Written by Paolo Genovese himself with Filippo Bologna, Paolo Costella, Paola Mammini and Rolando Ravello, Perfect Strangers was a choral comedy about human feelings and relationships, which somehow drew inspiration from William Friedkin's beautiful Dear Friend Harold's Birthday Party, at the time the first Hollywood film to speak openly about homosexuality. Also in Perfect Strangers this element emerged in an intelligent way, when we were following a strange dinner with friends, organized by Eva ( Kasia Smutniak ) and Rocco ( Marco Giallini ), husband and wife for many years and now dealing with a breakdown of passion and the bond that binds them. Other couples are present at the dinner: Cosimo (Edoardo Leo) and Bianca (Alba Rohrwacher), Lele (Valerio Mastandrea) and Carlotta (Anna Foglietta) and Peppe (Giuseppe Battiston), whose fiancée, however, was unable to come.

In a short time dinner will become, during a lunar eclipse, a festival of discussions on betrayals, fidelity and the secrets that the various cell phones respectively contain, a game on confessions. In the end everyone will have to  openly show messages and calls received in the last week. it will be something with absolutely unpredictable results, which will reveal unpublished backgrounds on the sentimental and personal life of each of those present.

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Perfect Strangers had been received triumphantly by the Italian public, grossing a good 16 million euros and leading the charts for a very long time, something that already in that 2016, was increasingly rare given the competition from foreign stocks. But the choral cast made up of actors transversally loved by the Italian public, the signature of Genovese, the direction and the very well thought-out dialogues and the great chemistry between the performers, as well as the dealing with issues that were anything but distant from our daily lives, had played a key role.



The Italian critics had judged him in a very positive way and a sea of ​​prizes and participation in various festivals had also arrived. Awards had come to the David di Donatello, the Nastri D'Argento, several Globes and Ciak d'Oro, as well as a prestigious showcase at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, with the award for Best Screenplay. The latter in particular, perhaps the real answer to the success we are talking about. Giampaolo Letta (at the command of Medusa Film) tried to outline a picture of what happened to Perfect Strangers: "It has attracted great interest at the Berlinale Market, we are literally inundated with requests for rights for remakes" explained Letta "arrive from all over the world, because the idea behind the story works in Rome, as in Tokyo, as in New York ”.

Today we prefer to imitate rather than create

To date, the total list of remakes counts 25 countries, the first was in Greece: Teleioi Xenoi , dated September 15, 2016. The last to be apparently added to the list is Denmark.

Perfect Strangers would also have had a double in the United States if it hadn't been for the scandal that overwhelmed Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, who of course had sniffed out the deal and also bought the rights to use Genovese's film.



But in the meantime, a small piece of Italian cinema has traveled all over the world, although obviously having to cope to the different specificities and the different purposes that each local public had. Needless to say, dealing with homosexuality and marital betrayal, the original script had several problems in Muslim countries. Here then is that the dinner between couples became in the Arab remake a meeting between seven friends, and so on. Something that, however, cannot take away the fact that Perfect Strangers is an absolutely current film, with its talk of sentimental disappointments that many encounter. But this proliferation of remakes, this entry of Perfect Strangers into the Guinness Book of Records, is also a signal that should not be underestimated about the current artistic sterility that is affecting the small and big screen today, given that by now something authentic, fresh and genuine, it gets harder and harder to see.

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Of course, in speaking of a certain fortune in having hit the right theme and the right characters with Perfect Strangers, Paolo Genovese is perhaps wrong in belittling his merit in a success which, given the breadth It can't be a mere coincidence. Because it is undeniable that this film, faithful to a decades-long tradition of our cinema and theater on the theme of masks and the truth in life, and at the same time international in speaking of couples and sociality in today's difficult world, is truly engaging. A quality that is based on a variety of situations and very powerful characters. Or maybe, as Walter Hill said, it has always been about repeating the usual stories, simply changing the way they are told. Because repetition also means ease of use, which guarantees great identification, something that the general public, in the ancient theaters of Greece as well as on modern platforms, has always generously rewarded. Sure, a lot of luck for Medusa Film and for Genovese. But what we really want for the world audience is a monothematic theme, which finally spreads from the cinecomics towards themes that until recently were connected to the specificity of the cinema of each country?