AT YOUR SERVOS
Emotional push and pull gives this science-fiction romantic-comedy film its soul
For as long as there have been robots in the movies — which is to say, almost as long as there have been movies — they have been portrayed as objects of physical and emotional desire. Back in 1927, the grandmother of all cinematic androids was introduced as a machine created to replicate its inventor's lost love in Metropolis.
Since then we've seen sexy robots in everything from Star Trek — the android Data was cheekily described as “fully functional” — to the Marvel movies, which gave us Vision. In between have been highs and (mostly) lows that include Jude Law's Gigolo Joe from A.I., the Fembots of Austin Powers ( borrowed from 1965's Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine) and the recursive robo-relationship of Blade Runner 2049, in which a Replicant has a hologrammatic girlfriend.
I'm Your Man is the latest story to place a humanoid robot squarely into an otherwise prosaic, more-or-less modern-day world. (See Marjorie Prime or, for literary examples, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, or Ian Mcewan's Machines Like Me.)
Maren Eggert stars as Alma, a historian who agrees to spend three weeks living with a humanoid robot that has been tailored to her personality. She'll deliver a report on the experience, and in return gain funding she needs for her studies. The machine, named Tom, is played by British actor Dan Stevens.
I'm Your Man is Germany's submission to the next Academy Awards, and is based on the short story Ich bin dein Mensch by Emma Braslavsky, adapted by director Maria Schrader. Stevens speaks flawless German, but the oddity of him in a foreign-language film gives Tom an otherness that plays into the movie's concept. As the manufacturer's representative (Sandra Hüller of Toni Erdmann fame) explains, Alma's profile indicated she would be attracted to someone not local, but not too exotic either. Hence British.
There's also a sense of Germanness (or Deutschtum, if you prefer) to I'm Your Man that has me cringing at the thought of a U.S. remake, perhaps also starring Dan Stevens alongside someone like Sandra Bullock. Maybe it's the fact that the movie is presented in a language that includes such words as sehnsucht (a yearning for something indefinite) and zweisamkeit (the shared loneliness of being in a couple). There's a reason we seldom speak of things being “found in translation.”
Alma, who clearly suffers from weltschmerz (world-weariness) and torschlusspanik (regret; literally the panic of the closed gate), isn't certain she wants to play her part in this experimental dive into domestic bliss. She consistently rebuffs Tom's attempts at romantic advances and even simple kindness. When he draws her a bath with bubbles, rose petals and candles, and says 93 per cent of German women love such things, she tells him she's in the other seven per cent.
Tom, for his part, is responsive, mild-mannered and quizzical — there's more than a little of Brent Spiner's Data in his inability to understand some elements of humour, though not for lack of trying. And despite his appearance, he has his tells. His “thoughtful” pose is a little too robotic, and he has a way of pouring coffee or crossing a room while maintaining eye contact with Alma, as only an entity with built-in lidar can.
Schrader has an interesting take on the subject of physical intimacy, an element of Tom's programming Alma is clearly meant to try out as part of the test. When she gets drunk after some disappointing news at work, Tom rejects her advances on the basis that she can't make an informed decision — a bit of programming more humans could use. But when they do get around to it, he seems oddly impassionate — while remaining fully functional, as they say.
This emotional push and pull is what gives I'm Your Man its narrative spark. Alma is complicated — I mean, we're all complicated — but she leans into that messiness. At one point she explains to Tom that not being happy is what makes her happy, a kind of paradox that would have short-circuited the sexy-dangerous androids of the original Star Trek series from the 1960s. Tom no doubt chalks it up to waldeinsamkeit, a kind of sublime feeling of solitude.
Of course, the open secret in all stories of artificial intelligence is that it's really about us — about the tension between the pursuit of happiness and its fulfilment. If you had a perfect mate who immediately met your every desire, you'd never feel vorfreude, the pleasure of anticipation. Also at play is the notion of what it is to be human — at what point in our creations of machine intelligence is the line to personhood crossed? Or, put another way, how much can you remove before you're no longer there?
I'm Your Man ably explores these philosophical dilemmas, but in a pleasing romantic-comedic package designed to delight as it enlightens. It is what the Germans would refer to simply as gut. Sehr gut. Very good indeed.