Photo via Bleecker Street Media
I'm Your Man
Some first dates get off to an awkward start. In I’m Your Man’s opening scene, Tom is stiffly affable and Alma edgy-wary. He’s effusively poetic, and when she demands to know his favorite poet, he replies, “Rilke”—and recites verse. The spell never has time to take hold because Tom’s verbalization gets stuck in repeat. He’s an android, she’s human, and his microchip needs replacing. “It’s hard to program flirtation,” explains the representative of Tom’s manufacturer.
With I’m Your Man, German director Maria Schrader (and screenwriter Jan Schomburg) taps into a long, anxious history of humanoid replicants in their nation’s fiction, starting with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” (1817) and continuing through Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927). Fans of Kraftwerk may recognize the resemblance of Tom, pale and animatronic, to the group’s image on their album The Man Machine (1978).
Alma (Maren Eggert), an archeologist, is assigned to a test program for a new line of androids in a Berlin that looks no further in the future than the day after tomorrow. She must live with Tom (Dan Stevens) for three weeks. Tom is programmed to share her interests (including favorite poet) anticipate her desires, be her perfect partner. As her supervisor tells her, the test program, and the evaluations by their human participants, has far reaching consequences (beyond replacing online dating). Will androids be given passports and accorded human rights or “partial human rights”?
I’m Your Man begins as a comedy of android error and romantic resistance from Alma, irritated at Tom’s artificial perfection and eagerness to be her perfect helpmate. She is nonplussed when she awakens to a lavishly set breakfast table and a “tidied up” apartment. Tom has even rearranged her books “according to a system.” When Alma looks displeased, the uncomplaining Tom puts everything back to where he found it, down to yesterday’s newspaper spread-eagled on the floor. “I’ll dirty up the windows again,” he offers. She tells him not to bother.
“I’m not looking for a partner,” she tells Tom. “And love doesn’t interest you at all?” he asks. “Definitely not,” she insists.
Alma has been disappointed in love and her work has papered over the empty places in her heart. Ironically, her research concerns the suspicion that poetic metaphor exists within Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions, those ancient clay tablets long thought to be merely storehouse ledgers. She is devastated when Tom, whose capacity to process data is boundless, informs her that a researcher in Argentina has just published an essay on cuneiform poetry, scooping her. He rightly describes her emotional reaction to the news as “tears of egotism.”
I’m Your Man grows more serious—and melancholy—as the fraught relationship between Alma and Tom gives rise to questions of consciousness and identity, the distinction between human and artificial intelligence. Tom is programed to simulate emotion and understands emotion better than most people—but can he feel emotion? In one telling scene, Tom sits in a coffee shop surrounded by people absorbed with their devices, not each other. Has human experience become virtually virtual? And in a subplot, Alma spends one day a week as caregiver for her dad, stumbling into dementia, losing his grip on consciousness. Who is he if he doesn’t know himself?
I’m Your Man worries about the dire consequences of technological progress—of creating android “dream partners” designed to mirror our desires and fantasies. Do our unfulfilled longings, the friction of living with genuine others, keep us motivated and moving forward? Can an artificial intelligence embodied as an android learn how to be more human through making mistakes? I’m Your Man is a provocative, thoughtful film disguised as a quirky romantic comedy as it addresses human complexity as well as technology.
I’m Your Man opens Friday, Oct. 8 at the Downer Theater and Silverspot Cinema.
