What does a modern city woman, no longer very young and highly educated, look for when she is looking for love? A person who is like you? One that compliments them? One who is willing to adapt – or one who lives his own life? In any case, what such a woman is definitely not looking for, absolutely and definitely not: a man who lets her take a bath in the evening, surrounded by candles, sprinkled with rose petals, and a glass of sparkling wine.
Alma, cuneiform researcher at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, is shocked by the romantic bath that her potential new partner has let her in. 93 percent of German women dreamed of exactly that, he counters, failing to understand that for someone like Alma, of course, that is exactly the problem. If the beautiful blond Tom with the blue eyes were a naturally grown man, he would be just the wrong person for her. But Tom is a robot and programmed to be the perfect life partner for Alma. So the bathroom scene would be more of a case for … customer service?
Not at all scary: Of course you feel a bit sorry for Alma’s partner android Tom (Dan Stevens).
(Photo: Christine Fenzl / Majestic)
In this romantic science fiction comedy, Maria Schrader tells of a dangerous self-experiment. Alma is actually only testing the innovative romantic robot to write an opinion about it for the German Ethics Council. How human is he, do you have to grant him and his kind rights, and if so, which ones? Or is it a dangerous commodity that will completely blow up the field of love, which is already threatened by technology, because it will cuddle generations of narcissists without criticism? Alma tends to do the latter. She doesn’t feel like trying, just doing it to get funding for her own research project.
This revolves around the question of whether there was poetry in early cuneiform documents – that is, where and when real, true human existence – art – began. And of course this is an indication of what this is actually about: What makes a person into a person?
Tom’s incarnation doesn’t look so good at first. Dan Stevens plays him, who became known for his role as the dream man in the British aristocratic series “Downton Abbey”. But that’s not all that makes him a fantastic, humorous cast. When Tom walks through Berlin in a friendly manner, he turns his head as abruptly as robot science fiction has become the code for the nonhuman in many decades. He can’t even order a coffee without it being somehow strange.
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On the other hand: Who can do that at the beginning of life as an adult in a big city. How does it work – be halfway normal? What social behavior, no matter how insignificant, is not learned and therefore: artificial? Behind the sunny Berlin atmosphere of her film, which at first glance seems so light and cheerful, Maria Schrader lets it simmer in a subtle philosophical way.
Is it the algorithm or is there real self-confidence growing in the android?
After a lot of kicks from Tom and Alma freaking out, the two of them come to terms with each other. Because the android learns: after all, even that you can refuse something to an intelligent woman here and there and maybe just because of this you become a serious partner. When Alma wants to try him out drunk in bed after a bad day, like a better sex doll, he says no. Soon the jerking of the head is gone, he lets the romantic textbook gestures remain and neither the viewer nor the researcher Alma will at some point still know whether his algorithm is simply working very well after all or whether a real self-confidence is really growing in the android.
Just as Alma struggles with her scientifically difficult to explain feelings, Maren Eggert plays with a warm-hearted brittleness. For her role she won the Silver Bear for best acting at this year’s Berlinale. The end for Alma and Tom is then maybe exactly what a city woman, no longer very young, wants love to be, even if she hasn’t looked for it: a melancholy, beautiful risk, without any scattered rose petals.
I am your human – D 2021. Director: Maria Schrader. Book: Jan Schomburg, M. Schrader, based on a short story by Emma Braslavsky. Camera: Benedict Neuenfels. With: Maren Eggert, Dan Stevens. Majestic, 105 minutes.