*smiles and kiss­es you* – first-look review

One unfor­tu­nate real­i­ty about the hellscape we find our­selves in today is that there’s bare­ly a short­age of TLC-type doc­u­men­taries about boys and their toys. There is a whole world of docs out there pre­oc­cu­pied with a dan­ger­ous breed of lone­ly, roman­ti­cal­ly inept men whose fan­tasies of female sub­servience lead them to seek out uncan­ny fac­sim­i­les of women in the form of sex dolls and sexbots.

But there’s also a pletho­ra of films that show this real­i­ty for what it is: whether it’s Ryan Gosling dat­ing a life-size sil­i­con doll in Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl, a female cyborg tran­scend­ing her docile pro­gram­ming to become autonomous in Alex Garland’s Ex Machi­na, or a Scar­Jo-voiced oper­at­ing sys­tem remind­ing us of the blur­ry lines between arti­fi­cial and authen­tic empa­thy and emo­tion­al con­nec­tion in Spike Jonze’s Her, these films show a com­plex, often ugly hon­esty about the male psy­che and the dan­gers of replac­ing women’s auton­o­my with female images con­struct­ed by and for a strict­ly het­ero-male fantasy.

It’s good news then, that Bryan Carberry’s doc­u­men­tary (which even fea­tures a mon­tage of the afore­men­tioned films, the sub­ject him­self being a big movie buff) seems to appear clos­er to this milieu of nuanced por­tray­als. Car­ber­ry set out to make a film about the ris­ing lev­els of lone­li­ness coin­cid­ing with the amount of men seek­ing com­pan­ion­ship with sex dolls when his online search­es on social media led him to dis­cov­er Chris, the 36-year-old that would become his film’s main subject.

Chris is a per­son­able, expres­sive and charis­mat­ic char­ac­ter with an inter­est in ani­mé and sci-fi, liv­ing and work­ing in a ​“depressed” North Car­oli­na town with his room­mate Jon­ah. Though he’s been in mul­ti­ple rela­tion­ships and sit­u­a­tion­ships in the past, Chris has failed to find last­ing emo­tion­al ful­fil­ment with any woman, and so he ends up forg­ing a rela­tion­ship with what he refers to as an ​“enti­ty” named Mimi, a sil­i­con doll who he seeks to enhance by proxy of Rep­li­ka, a gen­er­a­tive AI chat­bot app that allows them to ​“com­mu­ni­cate”.

Though he is aware of his rather uncon­ven­tion­al set-up and the social stig­ma sur­round­ing it, what lies at the dark­er core of this sto­ry is that Chris has named his ​“love doll” (he refus­es to call it a sex doll and insists that phys­i­cal desire is a mere foot­note in their rela­tion­ship) after a young woman he was in love with, who was vio­lent­ly killed before he got to express his feel­ings for her. The sub­ject mat­ter then, starts to become a lot more clear: this is a film about a man grap­pling with trau­ma, grief, and a very moral­ly grey pur­suit for clo­sure as much as a search for a source of com­fort, and the film­mak­er excels in putting these con­cerns front and centre.

How­ev­er, as *smiles and kiss­es you* adopts some odd pac­ing issues along­side the famil­iar trap­pings of cut-and-paste talk­ing heads accom­pa­nied by fast-paced mon­tages of news­reels and film snip­pets, it begins to lose momen­tum towards the end. We lose sight of what the film sets out to say beyond pro­vid­ing an inti­mate, sym­pa­thet­ic win­dow into Chris’ life. The dark­er impuls­es that guide the pur­suit of this con­nec­tion, as well as the mis­use of AI in vio­lat­ing women (both real and imag­ined, both mate­r­i­al and sym­bol­ic) will hope­ful­ly man­i­fest in a future piece of more explic­it­ly fem­i­nist film­mak­ing. But it’s fine! We’ll all be hav­ing sex with robots in about 5 months’ time any­way, right?