Paolo Genovese
Perfetti sconosciuti

"What happens if the viewer realizes that the film's characters are completely unreliable? That it is really hard to believe what they are telling?", asks Sergio Badino in the wonderful book (highly recommended) "Professione sceneggiatore" published in 2007. Good question, usually either the director is very skilled at covering up such a flaw or the actors are very convincing in portraying utterly unfeasible characters. Otherwise, there's a risk of making the film fail.

This is what the five, I say five, screenwriters (must be mentioned: Paolo Genovese, Filippo Bologna, Paolo Costella, Paola Mammini, Rolando Ravello) of "Perfetti sconosciuti" must have asked themselves. Indeed, the risk of unreliability was extremely high. I mean, you put a mixed group of characters of different humanities in an interior, each with their own lives and pasts, they interact with each other and every narrative solution, every dialogue that comes out of their mouths must be 100% believable. Well, this film pulls it off. And that's its greatest merit, aside from being one of the most beautiful Italian films (and one of the most enduring) of the last twenty years.

Do you know Hemingway's iceberg theory? The famous writer said:

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water" ("Death in the Afternoon", 1932, translated by Fernanda Pivano)

In our case, the screenwriters of the film knew well enough what they were narrating to make it believable, but they also omitted many details because they knew that the viewer would still catch them (there's no need to explain that in a petite bourgeois environment full of secrets and omissions, a theme like homosexuality is unpleasant to the eyes of the aforementioned petite bourgeoisie) and in doing so they made the whole perfectly homogeneous. Indeed, in narrating the events of an evening of a group of friends (or supposed friends) who decide to bare themselves (some more willingly than others), making public everything that appears on their cell phones, the screenwriters wanted to, by reflection, narrate a piece of not only Italian society that tends to mask its own weaknesses or, more often, its own meanness. Throughout the film, there isn't a single positive character, not one to care for. Some make us believe otherwise, but it's an illusion. In a short time, they reveal themselves to be worse than others or at least equal to them.

Paolo Genovese, who is a capable director (see also the latest "Follemente", 2025) but who sometimes gets lost in projects that are nothing short of convoluted (after this he made "The Place" which turned out to be an artistic and economic disaster), is brilliant here in handling just over an hour and a half of chatter, dialogues, twists, drama, laughter in a single setting, without ever causing boredom or tedium in the viewer. Sure, if one wanted to, two small, but not insignificant, flaws could also be found: the petite bourgeois context is typically simplistic (had he tried to make the same film in a proletarian context, he would have faced more challenges, but not everyone is Monicelli), and each character (except one, a frustrated housewife) is nonetheless well-off (one is a plastic surgeon, another a psychoanalyst, another a professor, another a legal consultant, even the taxi driver aspires to a higher social role) and the setting is all too Roman and chic (the apartment where the film takes place is in the Parioli neighborhood, not in, say, the Quarticciolo).

In reality, these are two forgivable flaws typical of certain modern cinema that no longer knows how to tell worker stories (as Monicelli said, Italian cinema ended when screenwriters stopped taking the bus), but, as was said at the beginning, the screenwriters know what they are talking about, engaging everyone in the end. Secrets are such and as such are democratic and can apply to both a bourgeois and a worker, only the context changes.

Credit must go to the entire cast, truly in top form. Some actors may never give a better performance than in this film, others reaffirm how excellent they are. The host couple Marco Giallini - Kasia Smutniak is perfect, but praise is also due to the monumental, in every sense, Giuseppe Battiston (who has the most challenging role), the usually impeccable Valerio Mastandrea (who revels in these roles), Edoardo Leo (although, especially in the first half, a bit with the brakes on) and the female ensemble, from Alba Rohrwacher (who, in my opinion, is one of the best actresses, not only Italian, of her generation) to Anna Foglietta, a revelation.

It was sold around the world, boasting countless theatrical adaptations (the setting lends itself well to it), including some celebrated ones in Israel, Argentina, and Uruguay. Following was the Italian stage version and, just last year, the American one, brought to the temple of theater, Broadway.

It grossed enormously, surprisingly, and became a cultural phenomenon. Perhaps because it touched on a topic to which all of us are more or less sensitive, as the tagline of the film said, "Each of us has three lives: a public one, a private one, and a secret one." It is the paraphrase of a famous line by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Then comes the challenge of managing them. Not easy.