CAPSULE: Perfect Strangers (2016, Dir. Paolo Genovese)

As if an Italian dinner party needs any extra fuel thrown on it, Eva (Kasia Smutniak) pushes her closest friends into a game of iPhone share-bears at a friendly couples get together. They’ve got no secrets, she posits. With nobody wanting to out themselves as the liver of a double life, the phones end up on the table and messages, emails and phone calls become public domain.

Naturally, the open book policy doesn’t go exactly to plan and the petit bombshells of the group’s social indiscretions keep the party rolling. For the most part it is pretty innocuous (girlfriends still in touch with their exes, missing invites to football matches and the like) but there are some meatier movements. And what’s an unwanted pregnancy or secret homosexual lover between friends?

Why anyone at this table thought it would be a good idea to opt into this parlour game is beyond me. That Eva saw fit to suggest it in the first place beggars belief, seeing as she is party to one of the group’s bigger indiscretions. There’s something to be said for subconscious self-outing but director Paolo Genovese and his raft of screenwriters are about as interested in saying it as the dinner guests are in eating Eva’s delicious looking meatloaf. They underline instead our complicity in keeping these very accessible little electronic windows into our private lives closed (though even then it feels like a dramatic cop-out on execution).

For all its Zeitgeisty fun, Perfect Strangers doesn’t really set itself apart from the internal-consumption cinema fare that Italy is focussing on at the moment (and has been for the past few decades). The look and feel of proceedings is totally MOR, missing the snap of the likes of Gabriele Muccino.

Entertaining enough but if I were looking for a truly sparky dinner party, I’d head over to Élisabeth and Pierre’s place.

★★★

Trailer: