Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/21/22

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, August 21, 2022

I’m Your Man (Maria Schrader, 2021)

Cast: Maren Eggert, Dan Stevens, Sandra Hüller, Jürgen Tarrach, Karolin Oesterling, Marlene-Sophie Haagen, Victor Pape-Thies, Falilou Seck, Hans Löw, Inga Busch, Wolfgang Hübsch. Screenplay: Jan Schomburg, Maria Schrader, based on a story by Emma Braslavsky. Cinematography: Benedict Neuenfels. Production design: Cora Pratz. Film editing: Hansjörg Weißbrich. Music: Tobias Wagner.

Leaving a hit TV show is not always a good career move – just ask David Caruso. But since he asked out of Downton Abbey, Dan Stevens has gone on to demonstrate that he’s one of the most versatile actors around. Still, I was surprised to find him speaking German – albeit with an English accent, as one character notes – throughout I’m Your Man. He plays an android with a kind of charm that turns from artificial to genuine as the story progresses. (The accent is explained as his programmer’s attempt to introduce a note of the foreign that German women find appealing.) The problem is that he’s an experimental model whose producers are testing on a volunteer: a middle-aged divorced anthropologist (Maren Eggert) who’s skeptical of their attempt to market a model life companion for lonely people. It’s a romcom setup, an odd coupling filled with awkward moments leading to an inevitable breakup and a just as inevitable reconciliation. But it works, largely because Stevens and Eggert are so skillful at the task. Stevens’s Tom has the wide-eyed naïveté and the somewhat birdlike movements of Star Trek’s Data, but he’s also able to project warmth and vulnerability. Eggert perfectly brings out Alma’s conflicted approach to the relationship, balancing skepticism with neediness.