I'm Your Man

It’s a tale as old as time: if we could build or buy better partners / lovers for ourselves, would we? And, if so, should we? And should we decide to do so, could we handle being perfectly matched in perfect, uncomplicated bliss? Or do we need that roughness of disagreement to be comfortable and “happy” in a way that we don’t quite understand?

This is the fertile field that we’ve seen mined in “Pymalion,” “Her,” and even “My Fair Lady.” The newest entrant is “I’m Your Man” in which a lonely, and recently made single, researcher in cuneiform is paired with an automated partner. As Lt. Data from Star Trek: TNG showed us, asking humans to explain themselves, their mores, and taboos is surprisingly affecting and engaging while being disarming and charming.

It’s only grudgingly that Alma (“Soul” in most Romance languages) takes on her android partner (“Tom” or “Thomas”). She meets him in an engineered meet-cute in a holographic salsa bar. Taking him home he proceeds to provide her with the alleged fantasies of women: he catalogs her books and tidies her home in minutes. He gives her a romantic bubble bath that nudges into Mariah Carey video territory. He offers himself to her sexually. He’s a friend, a colleague, a researcher, a shrink, a life-coach, and a vibrator with an infinite capacity to listen.

“Alma” is portrayed by Maren Eggert and “Tom” by the achingly handsome Dan Stevens (who’s fluent in German, who knew?). Most of us know Stevens from “Downton Abbey” and when Alma asks why he speaks German with a British accent she’s told it was present in her survey: she liked her men a little exotic, perhaps foreign. Stevens, with his crisp handsomeness provides a lupine beauty, like something from Anne Rice, while Eggert leans into the tears, sweat, and flesh of being human. As Tom reveals himself to be shockingly human, Alma leans harder into demonstrating that the life incarnate is a goddam mess. Through these poles a simple, yet compelling story plays out.

Alma’s peak vulnerability is that she is still bearing a private, intimate hurt from her previous relationship. Each time she’s about to open herself to Tom, she uses her human-ness and her hurts, both personal and professional, as a cudgel to drive him away. In this the audience sees itself.

Alma lets loose all the real vitriol that a hurt human can bring to another. She tries to shock Tom with how she wants sex versus how “93.7% of German women,” and it ain’t pretty. She spites his concern for her around alcohol and automotive safety (Not together! This is Germany, of course!). She spites him for the seemingly perfect level of care he gives. It’s the cruelty of a child who doesn’t yet recognize how heavily hurts can lay upon the attacked.

She delights in a certain level of Veruca Salt-like cruelty. Tom weathers this all and, like Gandhi suggested, his willingness to be kind through it all gets to her. In a particularly funny scene, his cleaning gesture rebuffed, he promises to return her house to the pig sty it was before: as he opens up a newspaper and dumps its pages into scattered heap, she registers a recoil: Have I let the basic things go so far?

In time, kindness makes Tom more-human-than-human and he helps Alma through some bitter straits.

But the question in this film is inescapable (and it surfaces with scant minutes left in its runtime): is this an OK things for humans to do? If we could be android-people instead of cat-people, should we?

The movie asks Alma to be our judge, but she’s incapable. She knows what is right for her species, what is right for their species, and she can’t live with either possibility and she can’t rule it out either. As one might expect in European kino, the film is more ambiguous, beautiful, and atmospheric than one would find in Hollywood, but there’s no doubt at the end that Tom has become more human, and so has Alma.