A man's complicated relationship with an AI-powered doll is the subject of this oddly moving yet morally grey documentary.
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 anime 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?
Published 20 Aug 2024
By Leila Latif
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