How
much do we know about one another? About our friends, neighbours,
even spouses and family members? Do we occasionally have some secrets
to keep? What do we tell them about our lives? How much do we want to
tell them? What do we filter out as unimportant, less important, a
thing to be told at the right time? Would we submit ourselves to an
experiment in radical honesty, making all of our communications
completely transparent for a period of time? Would we better off as
the titular perfect strangers?
Let
us say we have a group of coupled-up friends on a dinner in a fancy
Madrid apartment. Three couples and one single man, to be precise.
Men have been friends for a period of time, they play football
together, and their spouses came into the crew a bit later.
Alfonso
(Eduard Fernández) and Eva (Spanish star Belén Rueda)
are the hosts, he is a mediocre plastic surgeon “doing tits and
asses for waitresses and hair-dressers”, she is a psychotherapist
coming from the upper-class doctors’ family. Some of their
conflicts are about their professions and class background, while the
others concern their teenage daughter and their different approaches
to her.
Antonio
(Ernesto Alterio) and Ana (Juana Acosta) are a
middle-class couple with two children whose principal problem is his
mother living with them.
Eduardo
(boyishly good-looking Eduardo Noriega) and Blanca (Dafne
Fernández) are seemingly happy newly-weds with quite active
sexual life. She is not satisfied with her “new girl” status in
the group, while he is one of those man-child types always going into
risky business ventures to keep the sense of an adventure.
Pepe
(comedic gold Pepón Nieto) is an over-weight gym teacher who
was supposed to come with his new girlfriend Lucia who suddenly fell
ill.
At
one point, the conversation takes a turn towards their absent friend
who is going through a complicated divorce since his wife caught him
in act via text messages. The women around the table are taking the
standpoint that he is a pig for cheating on his wife. The men,
however, blame the technology and their friend’s naivety not to
remove his “digital footprint” because people were cheating and
having secrets since the dawn of time but the families were not
destroyed because of that.
So
everybody agrees to the experiment until the end of the night (which
is, by the way, the night of two celestial phenomena – blood moon
and lunar eclipse, suggesting some crazy behaviour to ensue) in which
every call would be put on loudspeakers, every text message and chat
would be read aloud, and every photo shown. As the night goes on, the
secrets that would surface are getting more and more serious and
attempts of cover-up turn into even bigger chaos threatening to
dissolve marriages and friendships.
If
it seems vaguely familiar, just try to change some of the characters’
names and the setting city from Madrid to Rome and you will get
exactly the same film from a year before directed by Paolo
Genovese. Even the title is the same, and this remake directed by
the Spanish veteran of horrors and cheeky comedies Álex de la
Iglesia is one of the “frame for frame” sort. We might find
some traces of de la Iglesia’s regular collaborator Jorge
Guerricaechevarría in the writing, especially in the witty
dialogues, but there is little to no chaos with only a dash of
fantasy sequences de la Iglesia is known for. As with Genovese’s
film, this version of Perfect Strangers would work better on
stage.
That
is a pity since the Spanish director has proven to be the master of
on-screen chaos capable to move fluidly through genres, but to
maintain the quality of his films and the tempo of a film in two
years. It seems that he is picking up the pace in the last couple of
years, and some sacrifices are being made. While not being a bad film
at all, Perfect Strangers would be remembered one of de la
Iglesia’s less stylish and less necessary works.
No comments:
Post a Comment