Career-best turn from Downton’s Dan Stevens
I’m Your Man
104 mins
Dir Maria Schrader
Cast Maren Eggert, Dan Stevens, Sandra Hüller, Hans Löw, Wolfgang Hübsch.
Tom (Dan Stevens) is every woman’s dream man, as long as the dream in question is a strange and unsettling one in which the body of Eighties-vintage Richard Gere becomes possessed by the spirit of C-3PO.
In that form, he’s one of the deeply unconventional romantic leads of I’m Your Man, a sensationally funny and gently science-fictional German rom-com which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival this week.
Directed and co-written by Maria Schrader, the premise resembles Steven Spielberg’s AI, but with added TLC. In near-future Berlin, a single historian called Alma (Maren Eggert) has been enlisted for a product trial.
For three weeks, she and nine other volunteers will live with robotic humanoids who have been engineered to be their perfect partners – and who will only become more perfect with every passing day as the behavioural algorithms become increasingly attuned to their needs and desires.
Alma’s model is Tom, who’s tall, handsome and unblinkingly gracious, with piercing, deep blue eyes. Yes, he’s a touch intense, and talks with a clipped earnestness that can be a little unnerving. But otherwise he looks and acts the part. On the drive home, he breaks the ice by offering Alma unsolicited driving tips which will reduce her chances of an accident by 27 per cent. As I say, the attention to detail is uncanny.
Schrader and her leading couple consistently mine big, smart laughs from this premise, while wading fearlessly towards its more perturbing implications. At first, Alma is left cold by the idea of a simulated soulmate, because in relationships she craves novelty and friction. Tom’s romantic routines, meanwhile, tend to skew towards rose petals in the bathtub.
“Ninety-three per cent of German women desire this,” he says with confusion, as she turns down a glass of bubbly and a candlelit soak. “Guess which group I belong to,” Alma snaps back.
Eggert plays Alma with a brusque, self-possessed wit that may remind viewers of Greta Gerwig, and it’s thrilling to watch her warm to Tom as his systems come to understand her better – while grappling with what this warming reveals about herself, since she ultimately knows the whole thing’s a charade. As for Stevens, he gives the finest performance of his post-downton Abbey career – and almost entirely in German to boot.
Tom’s relentless suavity and bonhomie is a scream, with tiny behavioural tics to die for: the way he pours cups of coffee without looking, for instance, or his note-perfect benign joshing when Alma’s ex (Hans Löw) pops round to pick up some things. Yet to what extent this is just another routine for Alma’s benefit is left teasingly and refreshingly unresolved.
She, meanwhile, studies ancient cuneiform tablets, searching for hidden poetry and artistry in engravings that were long thought to serve strictly practical purposes.
In other words, a human soul can be found even between lines of purely functional code. Remind you of anyone?