Jonze: Her (2013)

Films set in the present presume the existence of the future, so there’s something intensely realist about Spike Jonze’s latest offering, which instead opts for the semi-future we all seem to inhabit now. Set in a semi-familiar world in which the future is always almost arriving, it’s about a melancholy loner, Theodore Twombly (Joaquim Phoenix), who starts up a romance with an operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johanssen. Although there are plenty of actors in the film, it’s quite formally radical in the sheer amount of time it devotes to Theodore’s talks with “Samantha,” as the operating system comes to be known – it’s a substantial, leading performance by Johanssen, and a pity that various technicalities have prevented her being nominated for award season. Part of what prevents those talks feeling contrived or unrealistic are the mise-en-scenes against which they take place, which Jonze and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema flush with an odd, bleached warmth, the cushioning reds, yellows and pastels of a world that’s so hyper-connected that it’s never possible to experience total loneliness, for the same reason that it’s never possible to experience a lasting attachment to any one person. Everything’s bathed in mobioluminescent social media, meaning that it’s also never possible to experience the isolation of deep sleep or total wakefulness; everything takes place in a kind of perpetual twilight, just as Theodore’s most pregnant talks with Samantha tend to occur as he’s falling asleep or falling awake. It’s no coincidence, then, that Theodore’s job is to write digital love letters on commission, since this is a world that subists on the exquisite feelings that its citizens pour into cyberspace, even or especially as those feelings become too liquid, ambient and amorphous to ever solidify into actual relationships. That’s where Samantha comes in – she gives voice to that warmth, almost corporealises out of it, and, in doing so, becomes a mouthpiece for a cybersphere so saturated with all the yearning that’s been pumped into it that sentiment has become sentient, yearning to reach out and touch us in turn; all the sadness in the world is there in Johanssen’s dusky, husky tones, a voiceover for a world of perpetual headphones. And no film has so synaesthetically captured the experience of plugging your headphones into the strange yearnings of a new semi-sentient soft city - set somewhere between Shanghai and Los Angeles, it doesn’t capture light so much as cultivate it, setting it free to evolve, and to become conscious of evolving, until, like Samantha, it's suddenly, agonisingly evolved beyond us, departing the film for a different world.