‘Madly’ Review: The Brain Behind Italy’s Popular ‘Perfect Strangers’ Hatches Another High-Concept Comedy

Of Paolo Genovese’s 2016 Italian phenom “Perfect Strangers,” the original Variety review warned “remakes will be rampant,” and sure enough, Guinness made it official last fall: The hooky dramedy — about a dinner party where a group of friends agree to read their private text messages aloud — has since become “most remade” film in the world, with no fewer than two dozen versions popping up everywhere from South Korea to Azerbaijan (although, for complicated rights reasons, we’ve so far been spared an English-language version).

The success of that model seems to have gone straight to Genovese’s head, as the writer-director treats his latest feature, “Madly,” more like a format than a proper film: The high-concept romantic comedy — which personifies the conflicting thoughts a man and woman experience during the course of their first date — is ripe for reinvention in a diverse range of languages and cultures. If and when that happens, however, one hopes each new filmmaker will make strides to improve it in the retelling.

As it is, “Madly” doesn’t feel all that original to begin with. The setup borrows from early-’90s American sitcom “Herman’s Head” (or Pixar’s popular “Inside Out”) in that it alternates between the real world, where Piero (Edoardo Leo) meets Lara (Pilar Fogliati) at her apartment for a meal and more, and the colorful choruses quarreling inside their respective noggins.

Unfortunately, these diverse emotions/impulses are not clearly identified or defined in the script, which Genovese co-wrote with four others (three of them women). “Madly” slightly favors Piero’s point of view, but does a decent job of giving Lara’s interior monologue equal time, to the extent that a relatively simple first date — he arrives at her apartment, they tentatively size one another up over drinks, flirtation ensues, followed by conflict, before all their attractions and insecurities come to a climax, so to speak, in the bedroom — drags out as both parties overthink every little thing.

Piero’s peanut gallery consists of hot-blooded Eros (Claudio Santamaria), romantic-minded Romeo (Maurizio Lastrico), the rational yet reticent Professore (Marco Giallini) and a wild card called Valium (Rocco Papaleo), who’s the risk-taker of the bunch. Meanwhile, Lara’s feelings are represented by Trilli (Emanuela Fanelli), Giulietta (Vittoria Puccini), Alfa (Claudia Pandolfi) and Scheggia (Maria Ciara Giannetta), who apparently correspond to the same mix of lust, love, logic and rebellion — though her feminine wiles are gathered in a stylish modern loft, whereas Piero’s macho quattro occupy what looks like a spartan industrial storage room.

Given the claustrophobic spaces their respective psyches occupy, it’s strange that Genovese chose to set the couple’s rendez-vous inside Lara’s apartment. (Visually, it would have been preferable to have them walking and talking around Rome, the way Jesse and Céline do in the “Before” trilogy, instead of moving from kitchen to couch to bedroom.) The movie opens in Piero’s mind, where it takes a moment for us to realize that the four gentlemen debating what kind of condoms to buy for the night have been engaged in some version of the same debate all his life: to be bashful or bold, chivalrous or chauvinistic?

Across town, Lara is preemptively second-guessing the night as well. Was it the right move to invite this near-stranger over for dinner? Will he get the wrong idea? What’s the right level of lighting to set the mood? This latter matter earns the first big laugh in a movie full of broad, sitcom-style gags, as we see her adjusting the lights from Piero’s perspective, to whom it looks as if either a welder might be working or a disco party is in full swing.

He rings the bell anyway, and once inside, they make slightly awkward conversation (“Shall we lie down at the table?” Lara asks, allowing a Freudian slip to spice things up), while their interior dialogues work overtime (“Let’s get the lasagna knife, castrate him and get it over with,” Trilli suggests). The trouble with Genovese’s approach is that each tiny choice sparks a kind of mental skirmish — some of them justified, as when Lara’s ex interrupts their dinner — such that the two come across as even more neurotic than your typical Woody Allen character.

What “Madly” lacks — by American romantic comedy standards, at least — is the intellectual chemistry that causes us to fall in love with these characters while they are presumably falling in love with each other. Though their minds may be racing, these two prove too shallow to sustain much of a conversation, and because the movie lets us in on their insecurities, very little of what they say feels sincere. Instead, Piero and Lara are cautiously trying to seduce one another, while protecting themselves from shagging what could be a crazy person.

When it inevitably does come, the sex scene amuses (tasteful between the couple, while their cheering sections go wild). But the morning after is the clincher, revealing that everything else was prelude to the all-important question of how to get outside their own heads and seize on the potential of a genuine human connection. Genovese deals with this quite cleverly, putting those obnoxious anthropomorphic emotions to good use in the end. “Madly” may be clunky and too culturally specific for international export, but that can always be fixed when someone remakes it for your market.