Ultimately, Perfect Strangers is completely traditional material, albeit with a clever new twist.ĭe la Iglesia handles it all with elegance and a sharp, practiced eye, Angel Amoros‘ camera sometimes sweeping dizzyingly around the apartment, sometimes honing in on tell-tale details, all the time skillfully obliging the viewer to forget that we’re essentially watching a single-location movie. But the script abandons that line pretty quickly. Toward the end, there’s a 15-minute stretch where the farce gives way to something darker and the characters seem really to be suffering.
(Alfonso is the only properly grown-up character, which is a bonus, since in most Spanish comedies there are none to be found.) Standouts are Nieto, who delivers a fine little monologue on technology’s threats to relationships, and Fernandez, who, in a telephone conversation with his 17-year-old daughter Sofia (Beatriz Olivares), delivers the film’s quietest and most memorable scene, a superbly filmed, pin-drop counterpoint to all the farcical hi-jinx that precede and follow it. The characters are all familiar and relatable, and in traditional farce style events play out at a slightly frenzied pitch, but the performances go beyond the slick mechanisms and are strong enough to bring something individual to the table. Strangers hits the comic sweet spot more often than it misses, and the face-offs between Alterio and Nieto have terrific moments. By the end of the evening, after an extended stretch of comedy that is traditionally homophobic in its assumptions and that any English-language remake will have to tackle, all of the characters except one will have their damaging secrets aired. He asks Pepe to swap phones for the evening, and the lid comes off. With the idea of spicing things up, and safe in the knowledge that her relationship with Eduardo is secure, Blanca suggests that everyone lay their cellphone on the table so that the others can hear and read their calls and messages: After all, such old friends surely cannot be hiding anything from one another?īut after a prank call from Alfonso, Antonio confides to Pepe that he’s having an affair.
#PERFECT STRANGER MOVIE CHRISTIAN DRIVER#
Spiky psychotherapist Eva ( Belen Rueda) and plastic surgeon hubby Alfonso ( Eduard Fernandez) are a little older and perhaps wiser than the dinner guests at their central Madrid apartment: a couple in crisis, slimy Antonio (Ernesto Alterio) and brash Ana (Juana Costa), badmouthing each other from the start (and also a couple in real life) taxi driver Lothario Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega) and wide-eyed Blanca ( Dafne Fernandez), a newcomer to the group, very much in love and unemployed Pepe ( Pepon Nieto, similarly tubby and hirsute to Giuseppe Battiston in the Italian original), who much to everyone’s annoyance turns up late and without the new girlfriend everyone’s anxious to meet.Įarly scenes feature much offputting machista talk from the men, which will make them pretty repellent from the start to some audiences. So although it’s enjoyable to make the acquaintance of the well-played, crowd-pleasing Strangers, the encounter is quickly forgotten.Įvents unspool on the night of an eclipse - conveniently, eclipses are times when people go a little crazy, and tonight will be no exception. It’s a clever plot device, but one whose ramifications both Genovese and de la Iglesia are happy to skate over the surface of. “Everybody has three lives,” said Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “public, private and secret.” Like the Paolo Genovese original, which it pretty faithfully copies, Perfect Strangers explores to comic effect the capacity of cellphone technology to blur the limits between our different existences, as a group of friends agree to listen to one another’s messages and calls as they come in during a dinner party.
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