The reason he speaks German with an English accent, he tells her, is that she’s “attracted to men who are slightly foreign.”Īcross the lived-in clutter and disarray of her high-rise apartment, Alma determines to keep her distance. That’s his whole, selfless purpose - no species envy or power lust beneath the beaming facade. Hit or miss, there’s a childlike curiosity in the way Tom takes it all in, processing Alma’s words and reactions as he continually calibrates his algorithm to be her perfect partner. Still, in almost every instance of a gaffe in wording, syntax or behavior, Tom is instantly aware that he’s missed the mark: Stevens cools the high-wattage smile by a degree or two. The Terrareca facilitator of the evening (Sandra Hüller, of Toni Erdmann, striking a wry note between ditzy and officious) reveals this to Alma, and also confides that programming the robots to flirt is particularly difficult.Īs evidence of that challenge, Tom declares to Alma soon after they meet, “Your eyes are like two mountain lakes I could sink into.” His rumba moves take a similarly mechanical approach to sensual matters. The paradox is that many of those lovebirds are holograms, designed to up the sense of energy and romance for the humans in their midst. The singles-night event where Tom and Alma are introduced has a paradoxical throwback feel: It takes place in a vintage-style ballroom, with couples cutting a rug to Irving Berlin. The closest she has to a child is her father (Wolfgang Hübsch), increasingly fussy and uncontrollable as he sinks deeper into dementia. She has no partner, just a recent ex, Julian (Hans Löw), who’s a colleague and therefore an awkward presence on the margins of her workdays. Roger deems her the best candidate because, in his view, she’s the only truly single person on staff. She hates everything about the Terrareca company’s proposed product line, but her boss, Roger (Falilou Seck), is on the ethics committee for the android project, and she doesn’t want to alienate him as she nears completion of a years-long study of Sumerian cuneiform. An archaeologist at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, Alma agrees under protest to participate in a three-week trial run of Tom as a romantic partner.
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