I'm Your Man: Danke Schön, Mister Roboto

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

There’s already one award-season film out of Europe this year – Titane – about a consummated love affair with a car. So, a romance with a handsome robot equipped with partner-pleasing algorithms seems somehow less transgressive.

Unlike that outright horror film, I’m Your Man, Germany’s offering for the next Oscars, is an outwardly light-hearted crowd-pleaser about an emotionally-closed researcher (Maren Eggert) who is coerced by her boss (Falilou Seck) to beta-test the “perfect partner,” (Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens speaking British-accented German), one who anticipates her every need. 

Imaginary lover: Maren Eggert and her automaton lover (Dan Stevens) in I’m Your Man.

A rom-com of a sort, I’m Your Man candy-coats a darker message about what a relationship even is, or whether it’s wise to give yourself over to a synthetic perfect partner, one whose programmed solicitude no human could match.

Alma (Eggert) is a decidedly uncooperative early adapter. She’s only agreed to test-drive Tom (Stevens) in a quid pro quo to retain funding for her studies of ancient writings. Her plan, essentially, is to leave Tom gathering dust in a corner of her apartment. Even given his initial captivity, Tom has other plans, greeting her at day’s end with candle-lit baths surrounded by rose petals (buoyed by statistics that this is the romantic fantasy of more than 90% of German women).

But Alma is not a statistic, and the more she rejects his attention, the more his algorithms go to work. There is a birdlike quality to Tom when he gets “lost in thought”- i.e. recalibrating. Director Maria Schrader does fall to physical tropes to communicate Tom’s artificiality. One is a tendency to not blink. Given that Tom is created to pass as a human with the latest in near-future technology, programming two or three blinks every 10 seconds seems like a no brainer.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

But Stevens uses these tics to great effect in his personification of Tom. The movie wouldn’t work without his believable depiction of Tom’s growth and increasing insight into human behavior (up to and including the use of sarcasm to respond to humans who treat him like a sophisticated toaster). His visit to Alma’s office, where he spots a fatal flaw in her cuneiform studies at a glance, is particularly perplexing for him, since the “favor” amounts to a major career setback for her.

In short, Stevens delivers Tom’s being.

Soon, he inevitably has existential thoughts, and self-doubt. But are these things real, or programmed? By the time the softened Alma is allowed to return him, she has doubts all around. 

I’m Your Man is certainly a metaphor for our increasingly intimate relationship with our own technology. Some have seen it as a direct reference to our intimacy with personae on social media, virtual relationships that exist at the expense of our connections with people in the real world.

Whatever it is supposed to be, it is a smart and often witty take on a not exactly new sci-fi premise.

I’m Your Man. Directed and co-written by Maria Schrader. Starring Maren Eggert and Dan Stevens and Falilou Seck. Opens Friday, October 15 at the Carlton Cinema in Toronto and Vancity in Vancouver.