“Perfect Strangers” has been remade more than 20 times since 2016

ONE EVENING seven old friends—three couples and a divorcee—meet for a dinner party. The psychiatrist in the group proposes a game: each person will put his or her phone on the table and when they receive a call, text, Whatsapp message or email, they must answer or read the message aloud. All agree, for they have nothing to hide. Or so they claim.

The exercise, as it first plays out in “Perfect Strangers”, an Italian film of 2016 (pictured) directed by Paolo Genovese, inevitably causes chaos, revealing affairs, an accidental pregnancy and closeted homosexuality. The film made more than $30m worldwide; its screenplay won a prize at the Tribeca Film Festival. It has since been remade in more than 20 countries—which is perhaps the highest tally of any film, certainly any made in recent years. An Icelandic version will be released on January 6th and a Danish iteration is expected to follow later in 2023.

Why is “Perfect Strangers” ripe for adaptation? It helps that the story has a straightforward plot structure that allows the screenwriter to tease out cultural nuances, says Annette Insdorf of Columbia University. The Italians dine on gnocchi and the Icelandic on reindeer. The French guests bring wine; their South Korean counterparts offer paper towels, symbolic of good luck.

Differing social attitudes are evident, too, when you compare one version with another. In the Arabic-language remake (pictured below), set in Beirut and released on Netflix in 2022, one character is a housewife who brings up her children with the help of a family member who lives in her home. The Italian film includes the at-home relative, but the mother works. In the Icelandic remake, it is a father who has taken on the bulk of the childrearing duties and there is no mention of extended family. A plotline in the Italian film—about the friends’ bigoted reaction to learning one character is gay—might have seemed passé in Denmark, where same-sex relationships are widely accepted. Instead, in that country’s version, the character is closeted only because she is married to a man.

Yet the broader theme of “Perfect Strangers”, of individuals’ reliance on technology and expectations of privacy, is one that cuts across cultural divides, at least in the rich world. In the Italian, South Korean and Arabic-language films, the characters gossip about a mutual friend whose wife caught him cheating by snooping through his phone. His failed marriage—in part caused by his failure to secure his mobile—prompts the characters to share their calls and texts at the dinner table.

“Perfect Strangers” may also appeal to movie executives because it is cheap to make, as the cast is small and most of the film is shot in a single room. It has attracted famous actors, too, thanks to its substantial, character-driven parts. The original Italian version stars Valerio Mastandrea, a winner of several David di Donatello awards (the country’s equivalent of the Oscars). The Icelandic version features Hilmir Snaer Guonason, who is best known for appearing in “Lamb” (2021), an acclaimed eco-horror film. Mona Zaki, a prominent Egyptian actor, starred in the Arabic version, alongside Nadine Labaki, a Lebanese actor and director.

One country is conspicuously absent from the list. Hollywood often remakes foreign films in English, then exports dubbed or subtitled versions around the world; this dissuades other countries from releasing their own take on the material. (Such was the case with “Three Men and a Baby” and “The Upside”, which were remakes of French films.) But there is not yet an English-language version of “Perfect Strangers”. Harvey Weinstein’s (now defunct) film company bought the rights in 2017. In 2019 Issa Rae, an actor and producer, announced that she would make the film for an American audience, but scant details have been revealed since. Hollywood has left a gap in the market, in which international storytellers have thrived. ■