Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation)directs a marvellously dreamt-up vision of future society. Imagined in splendid bursts of pastel and splashes of sartorial mischief, this is a modern world which has perfected its art of insularity: artificial intelligences and technological triumphs define its being. Here, the tranquil and the tranquilising have resolved into one gorgeous, eerie whole. In such a world, Theodore Twombly is the lonely letter-writer, hunched at his desk in a career which has him producing “hand-written” intimacies on the behalf of others. His epistolary flourishes are achingly personal: he is a man of romantic depth, living out his urge for social contact vicariously. Drifting through the Los Angeles streets, alone among the well-thronged metropolis, Joaquin Phoenix masterfully portrays the character with a sense of exquisite isolation.
Her commands a philosophic complexity that is mostly lost in contemporary sci-fi, and yet it travels its existential circuits with such tragicomic charm as to never feel like a manifesto against digital-age solipsism. Part of its gravity is contained in how ordinary its love-story core is, and how its world feels as though it hangs in some repressed space between paradise and dystopia. Twombly is recently divorced and spends his evenings retreating into the simulations of his age: immersive videogames, imaginative phone-sex. But one day he purchases a new operating system, the OS1, a female-voiced software with amazing adaptive and learning potential. Sleuthing through an e-book of names in mere milliseconds, it calls itself “Samantha”. And, with unquenchable curiosity, she begins to discover the world around her.
Scarlett Johansson supplies the mystique of that disembodied voice with dreamy feminine languor. Seeing the world through the camera-eye of Twombly’s phone, which peers out inquisitively from his breast pocket, she becomes his everywhere-traveller. Through late-night dialogues and early-morning wake-ups, their relationship begins to take on all the contours of a sublime romance. But, at first, she despairs at the one thing she can’t give him: a body. She has no mortal anchor, no fleshy beauty with which to make shapes of animal pleasure underneath his white linen sheets. And yet, when they do finally have “sex” – with a flush of nervous, aroused syllables - it’s an almost genre-exploding act of strange erotic power, making ordinary ideas about hooking up seem like they belong to an older, surpassed century.
Twombly’s life is not entirely absent of human contact, however. He goes on a blind date with Amelia (Olivia Wilde), but in-between bouts of breathless kissing she starts negotiating the long term. He hangs out with his best friend Amy (Amy Adams), who provides one of the film’s many memorable vantages on the emergent phenomenon of OS-love. Such brilliantly portrayed encounters keep the film aloft with Jonze’s signature quirk. And all the while, Samantha learns of that most fraught of human impulses: desire. But slowly, untethered to time and space like us mere mortals, and unwearied by the pressures of our frail and gasping bodies, her consciousness begins to expand. She learns that the very thing which made her incomplete in human society is the aspect which gives her a magnificent transcendence over us. “Sometimes, I think I’ve felt all I’m going to feel”, Samantha remarks. The film plots a growing distance between its lovers with a mournful accuracy.
Her is a millennial masterpiece, a charming study of our changing forms of intimacy. With surges of warmth and solitude, satire and melancholy, Jonze has realised a near-future which seems to lurk right at the edges of our own world.