“Perfect Strangers,” the 2016 hit Italian comedy, had inspired 18 remakes by July 2019, a feat recognized by Guinness World Records.
The four versions of the film I’ve seen — Korean, French, Japanese and the original by Paolo Genovese — are all entertaining enough. But the setup — three couples and one single man agree to share each other’s smartphone text and voice messages as a sort of “truth or dare” game at a dinner party — is hardly groundbreaking, if clever. A compromising email is just a modern version of a letter that elicits laughs when read aloud on stage, a convention going back to Plautus, the Neil Simon of ancient Rome.
That said, the original award-winning script co-written by Genovese is a marvel of plotting, invention and compression, with hardly a misfire or dead spot. In remake terms, that makes the story idiot-proof.