
Sexual sparks aren’t an issue for Bianca (Alba Rohrwacher) and Cosimo (Edoardo Leo), relatively new at the marriage game and frequently frisky. Lele (Valerio Mastandrea) and Carlotta (Anna Foglietta) express little warmth towards each other, which may explain her drinking problem. Mother-daughter communication is not their strong suit, and besides, guests are coming. It’s also intensely wordy, neatly fitting in to the minor vogue for single location dramedies such as Polanski’s “Carnage.” “Strangers” begins in multiple settings, but the bulk of the action takes place in one apartment.Įva (Kasia Smutniak) and Rocco (Marco Giallini) are having friends over for dinner, though tension is high at home after Eva rifles through the handbag of teen daughter Sophia (Benedetta Porcaroli) and finds condoms. The helmer made his name at home with a number of good-natured if hardly deep comedies with wide cross-generational appeal thematically this, his tenth feature, appears to be a more biting commentary on contemporary society, but the script fails to go beyond the superficial. Remakes in other languages seem virtually assured.

Never mind that the film itself is an unsubtle chat fest stocked with immature characters because it’s so tuned to the zeitgeist of the bourgeoisie, it’s become a major talking point in Italy, where it’s doing boffo business.

Paolo Genovese’s “ Perfect Strangers” plays on this near-universal fear via a party game in which dinner guests share all incoming messages and calls in a recipe for awkward revelations.

Never before have secret lives been so easy to negotiate, yet the risk of discovery, even if you’re not Jennifer Lawrence, has never been greater: It’s all there in that little device. It’s fair to say that most everyone with an active cell-phone life has used those indispensable gadgets in ways not meant for public consumption.
