I love Her.
Once in a while a film comes along that is so original, so inventive and so graceful, so clever and so immaculately built, that being smitten is obvious.
But this is no trifling affection; as I basked in the sheer loveliness of Spike Jonze's new film, it's orangey-glow warming my face and innards, I was awed and overwhelmed and smiling that moronically wide smile we usually save for lovers.
I watched it twice, and can't wait to again. I love Her, and I'd like to buy Her a bunch of daisies and serenade Her with a boom-box under the window.
This is a film about a man who falls in love with an operating system.
Our hero Theodore Twombly is a loner with a Nabokovian name who provides romance to those too busy to conjure it up themselves, via a website called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters, which is a far sneakier version of our greeting card companies.
He's nearly-divorced, lives alone, likes to wear his pants right under his ribs and plays atmospheric video games that seem endless -- not to be confused with pointless -- and yet happens to be what may well be called a professional romantic.
He loves the idea of love, even if it has already walloped him in the gut.
Theodore lives in the future, or something like it. It may merely be just a better-designed present, an iPresent.
It's a world where things are beautiful and functional and minimal, where Apple must have won and Jonathan Ive dominates all, where form is charming enough to give way to function while remaining gorgeous.
It's never specified, but it doesn't seem a distant future. It's relatable to possibly an alarming degree, what with random chatrooms and the ubiquity of people walking around talking into their earpieces. (Twombly’s earpiece looks like a tiny seashell, as if perpetually held up in the hope of hearing the sea.)
As night fades into day, we glance screensaverishly over skyscrapers for miles and miles; for this future vision of large-tall Los Angeles, Jonze has shot larger-taller Shanghai, and that says much about where we might be headed.
One unremarkable afternoon, Twombly picks out a new operating system that promises to be more than the usual, a digital consciousness that is not just intuitive but actually possesses intuition. He turns it on at home that night, and the setup question ‘Would you like your OS to have a male or a female voice?’ is immediately followed by 'How would you describe your relationship with your mother?'
Twombly is stumped but must have gotten something very right indeed, for the next "Hi" we hear is bursting with buoyancy, a girl's voice brimming with eager, spunky energy.
She picks out the name Samantha for herself and Twombly sniggers. 'Was that funny?', she asks. ‘Yeah,’ he says. She laughs. 'Oh good, I'm funny.' She sounds delighted.
And so Theodore falls in love with Samantha.
The point isn't that Theodore falls for the central conceit; the point is that we do.
He's a loner who hasn't "been social" in some time, but we fall for Samantha just as hard as he does, and the romance they share envelops us.
We don't feel -- like, say, in the touching Lars And The Real Girl, where Ryan Gosling is smitten by a blow-up doll -- that the protagonist is an outcast making do with something unreal; instead Jonze presents us with a relationship
It is a world where dating one's OS isn't at all unheard of, or frowned upon.
It is uncommon, but for the adventurous, like the early-adopters who'll buy an iPad the earliest, people looked at with bemused admiration by the curious and the smart.
The detailing is exquisite. Ever since computers have tried to 'talk,' and here I'm thinking of early MacinTalk, the only voices that sounded realistic were the whispers and, well, the exaggeratedly robotic ones.
Samantha's voice is real as can be, naturally, but its dreamy breathiness is often a result of her being whispery. Samantha does his basic tasks but is offended when he accidentally gives her a command rather than a request.
'Read email,' he says, and there is the briefest and most crucial of pauses. 'O-kay, I will read e-mail for The-o-dore Twom-bly,' she says in her best Data-voice, underlining each syllable with robotic syncopation.
He laughs and apologises immediately, as if asking his operating system to check his email is impolite. And you thought Siri could be demanding.
Theodore takes Samantha out with him, fitting a safety-pin to the base of his shirt-pocket so that his ‘phone’-camera peeps out of his pocket, so she can look out and see what he sees. And the width of the device and the safety-pin are so similar that the pin looks like its base, making his pocket appear bottomless.
Function over form, yes, but what marvellous form. This is a beautiful film thoroughly besotted with its own elegance -- its fragility underscored by Arcade Fire’s tinkly-twinkly background score -- as it deserves to be.
Joaquin Phoenix dons a moustache to play Twombly, and shows us that he too, the master of tortured characters, can grin like an aforementioned loon as he falls head over heels in love.
It's a wistful performance, and Phoenix is stirringly great as he makes Twombly vulnerable and flawed and oh so much like you and me.
Scarlett Johansson shines as Samantha, enthusiastic and sincere, sensual and dominating, increasingly intelligent and thus increasingly exasperated.
"I've seen you feel joy," she says to Theodore, "I've seen you marvel at things," her voice coming from a place so pure it seems unreal.
She's rousingly good, inspiringly good. We never see her on screen, but this is Johannson at her finest. We sense her growth as she starts off asking questions about everything and is soon "proud of feeling" her own feelings, and we are both amused and afraid of her at different points in the film.
It is rare to watch a film and feel your jaw drop as you, well, "marvel at things.”" Her could easily and cleverly have been a satire, but Jonze's film -- which, contrary to what this review might have led you to believe, does contain other people, co-workers and friends and beautiful ex-wives and real women to touch and kiss and feel -- is more affectionate than it is cold, more full-blooded than it is brutal.
Her is, by far, the best picture of the year, and miles ahead of the other Oscar nominated films, but those comparisons don't seem at all relevant when I sit back and smile (stupidly wide) at the impressions the film has left.
This review, believe me, could be six times its size.
For all its conceptual highs, Her is not a film about technology, though it is partly a cautionary fable. This is a film about love. A film to love.
Rediff Rating:
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