It means ‘Perfect strangers’, and it’s a good movie, really good. One of those ‘all in one room’ stories, with various characters confronting each other, it’s well done. I liked it.
The story is simple: a group of friends get together for dinner, waiting to see the lunar eclipse. They talk about a mutual friends, who had an affair with a young woman destroying his marriage, and it start a conversation about how everyone has secrets. One says that if everyone could see the phones of the others, who knows what secrets they might learn. Of course everybody says Oh no I don’t have secrets, so she proposes a game: let’s put all our phones on the table and every time a message arrives we all read it, and if someone calls we’ll put it on speaker.
It seemed innocent enough… nobody wanted to say no because it would have made them look guilty… so they play, and hell breaks loose.
The hosts are: Rocco (Marco Giallini) and Eva (Kasia Smutniak), and the guests are Lele (Valerio Mastandrea) with his wife Carlotta (Anna Foglietta), Cosimo (Edoardo Leo) with his wife Bianca (Alba Rohrwacher) and Peppe (Giuseppe Battiston) who comes alone saying his girlfriend Lucilla - that nobody has yet met - is sick and decided to stay at home.
It starts slowly, with Carlotta that was looking into nursing-homes for her mother-in-law but hadn’t told her husband, and Bianca who still talks to her ex-boyfriend, but only as friends, he asks her advice from time to time on how to deal with another woman.
It comes out that Eva wants plastic surgery, but even if that’s exactly what her husband does, she’ll have another doctor do it, and Rocco says that it’s because her father hates him and thinks he’s not good enough. Eva says that Rocco thinks her work is useless (she’s a therapist) only to find out that he’s in therapy himself, has been for a few months now.
She also finds out that their teenage daughter talks to him about her life and her doubts on whether she wants to have sex with her boyfriend or not, but can’t tell her mother because she always criticize her, never listens to her. Rocco actually gives her very good advice, he tells her that this is something that she’ll always remember, something important, and that if she’s sure that she’ll look back at it with a smile on her face maybe she should do it, but if she has doubts she doesn’t need to rush it, she has all the time in the world; plus, earlier that day Eva made a scene because she found condoms in her bag, and it turns out that he gave them to her so she’d be prepared when the time comes (because they’ve been teenagers too, and if teenagers want to do it, they’ll find a way as it has always happened in the world).
During a break, Lele asks Peppe to switch phones (since they have the same iphone) because at the same hour every night a girl sends him a rather explicit picture, and he can’t have his wife see it. Peppe doesn’t like the idea at all, but Lele switches them anyway when nobody’s looking. When the picture arrives, everybody thinks it’s for Peppe, but then Peppe’s phone rings, and a guy called Lucio says he misses his kisses, and OMG the room goes mad (because of course they think it's for Lele). Carlotta is of course shocked and understandably makes a big deal of it, but what’s not understandable is Cosimo’s reaction: he gets angry, saying they’ve been friends for years, changed together, showered together, and he never said a word… and I would have liked to punch him in the face, and was not surprised at all when he turned out to be the worst of all: why on earth would he tell you? sex life should be private, nobody has the moral obligation to say who they like to have sex with, this is totally crazy!! That’s why I hate the term ‘coming out’ which of course means out of the closet, implying that someone was hiding… why nobody points out the madness of this term? Now it’s hiding if someone doesn’t go around telling everyone who they sleep with!! (I mean, it is hiding if a gay man marries a woman, but the only ones involved are the two of them, nobody else has the right to feel offended by it!!). I don’t know you, but when meeting someone new or when talking to friends, I don’t talk of my sex life, that’s my business, and neither do my friends. I mean, if anybody wants to, that’s ok, no problem with that, but it’s not an obligation! Come on!
Anyway, Lele listens to all this without revealing the truth because it would reveal that the sexy-picture was meant for him, plus that he arranged the deception. You can see from their glances that Peppe wants to reveal the truth, but Lele stops him, and I think there was some pretty good acting here.
Carlotta has a special friendship with someone on facebook, they have sex-talks, but they’ve never met, and don’t intend to.
When they had a car accident some time ago in which a man died, she was driving drunk but he took the blame so not to leave their two small children alone, and then never talked about it, and this added ice to their falling-apart relationship.
Cosimo receives a call: a jeweller his friend asks him if ‘she’ liked the ring, and Bianca smiles looking at her finger, and also if ‘she’ liked the earrings, and Bianca doesn’t smile anymore because she never wears earrings, and asks him about it (we learn in a later scene that he gave them to Eva!!). Now less trustful, when a girl calls she answers. She always felt confident that Mariska was an unattractive sort of coworker, but now it’s a young girl who calls Cosimo her ‘love’ and tells him that the tests are positive and she’s pregnant… she feels sick, she trusted him so much :-/
Before going away, Peppe stands up saying that it’s him (they use a very common but not so nice word to mean gay men throughout the scenes with Lele, but when they understand the truth Rocco says the word ‘gay’ and Peppe tells him to avoid the hypocrisy, something like that). Peppe tells them that that’s why he was fired, but that he can’t sue them because if he couldn’t even tell his friends he won’t be able to tell the world, for sure.
They are like:why didn’t you tell us? Peppe didn’t know it himself for some time, and then it was too difficult; Lele understands, saying that he’s been gay for two hours in that house and has had enough of them already.
Rocco tries to be polite, saying that they want to meet Lucio, but Peppe says they’ll never meet him because they would hurt him with their furtive looks or whatever and he wants to protect him from that, like you do when you care about someone, you protect him.
It’s time to go home, and when they leave we see Bianca giving back the ring, Eva secretly giving back the earrings, and Rocco exchanging glances with Cosimo, which might mean that he knows… we’ll never know, because next scene they are out of the house, saying goodbye in the street, and all is well, they are all together peacefully and Peppe says they’ll meet Lucilla when she feels better… and then we hear Eva saying to Rocco that he was right in refusing that silly game! It’s a sliding-doors-scenario!
Basically, the only one that was totally innocent was the one that could bring himself to say no to it, only to give his phone privately to his wife later, if she wanted to look at it, but she doesn’t.
Sure, you could say Bianca was innocent as well, but she was the new one in the group, only recently married, while the others had been friends a long time.
They’ve known each other for years, thinking they know each other well, but actually they’re like perfect strangers.
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