Her

That title… So sim­ple, so roman­tic, so gen­tly wist­ful. With­out know­ing any­thing about the film it sits atop, that sin­gle, unadorned word con­jures images of a man, a roman­tic man, a sen­si­tive soul long­ing for a woman. And the woman is every­thing to him, a Venus fig­ure, his ide­al. His focus is trained on Her. Is she his sin­gu­lar, all con­sum­ing obses­sion? Pos­si­bly. Prob­a­bly! But he is removed from this woman. She is gener­ic, not spe­cif­ic. There’s no name. He dreams about her, wor­ships her from afar. He has her, but can’t hold her.

For his fourth fea­ture as direc­tor and first as sole writer, Spike Jonze has made a film whose roman­tic essence can be traced right back to clas­sic Hol­ly­wood. Her is a Brief Encounter or an An Affair to Remem­ber for our times, gay sub­texts left ful­ly in tact and trans­posed to a pas­tel-hued future that resem­bles a city-sized branch of Gap Kids. It’s also a piece of hard spec­u­la­tive sci-fi which fus­es a sub­tle dystopi­an twist onto a time­worn tale of amour fou. The tragedy of Her is that it sug­gests there are no lessons to be learned from movies like Brief Encounter, that humans will con­tin­ue to blind­ly fol­low the law­less impuls­es of the heart even though it will like­ly result in pain and sad­ness. In fact, tech­nol­o­gy will only help to facil­i­tate fur­ther (and more com­plex) occa­sions for poten­tial roman­tic folly.

The love affair in Her is not illic­it in the tra­di­tion­al sense, but it’s cer­tain­ly strange and what con­ser­v­a­tive read­ers might describe as ​“alter­na­tive”. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lone­ly near-divorcee whose job involves dic­tat­ing beau­ti­ful hand­writ­ten let­ters into an intu­itive com­put­er pro­gramme. He ghost writes them for oth­er peo­ple, coast­ing on a nat­ur­al abil­i­ty to lend poet­ic heft to balmy plat­i­tudes. Not quite ready to get back into the game, he pur­chas­es an oper­at­ing sys­tem for his com­put­er which has been pro­grammed to mim­ic human emo­tion to a near-imper­cep­ti­ble degree. When he loads up the soft­ware and splut­ters through a (hilar­i­ous­ly) rudi­men­ta­ry start-up ques­tion­naire, he finds him­self in the close com­pa­ny of Saman­tha, who is brought to life via Scar­lett Johansson’s sul­try, dis­em­bod­ied voice.

The crisp, retro-futur­ist pro­duc­tion design and eeri­ly primped and cleansed Cal­i­for­nia back­drop (filmed in Los Ange­les and Shang­hai) man­age to anchor the basic con­cerns of the film in the present while keep­ing them at a dead­pan dis­tance. Jonze has envis­aged a future in which the hip­sters won, and high-waist­ed trousers and horn-rimmed specs are par for the course. But this is a relat­able future, one which trades on that great joke from Rian Johnson’s Loop­er, in which Chi­na dom­i­nates the social and cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny. The film also recalls recent alarmist news sto­ries about the prob­lems of Japan­ese teenagers who have become entire­ly apa­thet­ic towards sex and are unknow­ing­ly dimin­ish­ing the gov­ern­ment tax base. If there’s vir­tu­al, self-clean­ing sub­sti­tute is out there, then why not?

Even though we can’t see what she looks like, Her allows the view­er to con­coct their own flaw­less men­tal effi­gy of Saman­tha. As great as Johans­son is, a more anony­mous voice would’ve made that task even more grat­i­fy­ing. Theodore falls doo-lal­ly in love with those hon­eyed tones, a man­u­fac­tured per­son­al­i­ty that is unable to stim­u­late all sens­es at the same time. Is that even pos­si­ble? Can the emo­tion­al exist with­out a phys­i­cal pres­ence, and vice ver­sa? Theodore is frag­ile, he can still feel the after­burn of a failed mar­riage with Cather­ine (Rooney Mara), a prodi­gious young nov­el­ist who became agi­tat­ed by his fatherly/​introspective demeanour. But there’s no sense that Theodore is dam­aged in any way, and his rela­tion­ship with Saman­tha is pre­sent­ed as a healthy one, just the quirky symp­tom of unchecked tech­no­log­i­cal progress.

Her is Spike Jonze’s best film, and more inter­est­ing­ly, it boasts a script that’s arguably even stronger and more fine­ly tex­tured and curi­ous than the intel­lec­tu­al­ly som­er­sault­ing beasts penned by his one-time part­ner in crime, Char­lie Kauf­man. The way in which the film evolves from a bliss­ful love sto­ry between Theodore and Saman­tha into a deep (though always uncyn­i­cal) inqui­si­tion into the ever-more potent and pos­si­bly doomed love affair between peo­ple and tech­nol­o­gy comes entire­ly nat­u­ral­ly. Jonze’s film hones rather than broad­ens its focus, end­ing on an unfath­omable conun­drum of the ​‘Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?’ ilk.

Yet what makes Her so great is that despite its appar­ent­ly cau­tion­ary con­text and the fact that it’s about the inter­ac­tions between one man and his fan­cy com­put­er, what it has to say about the nature of love, com­pan­ion­ship and obses­sion is human and time­ly. The basic logis­tics might not be the same (sex is cer­tain­ly one hur­dle that can’t be eas­i­ly vault­ed), but as a study of how lovers talk and jus­ti­fy their actions, it may as well have been set in the ​’40s. The topog­ra­phy of the rela­tion­ship we mon­i­tor can eas­i­ly be read as one between two nor­mal peo­ple with all sens­es in tact. It’s a love sto­ry for our time and for all time.