Her: “Can a love story between two people, only one of whom is on screen, work?”
Spike Jonze’s original love story, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara and the voice of Scarlett Johansson, celebrates its tenth anniversary.
Everyone falls in love with Scarlett Johansson…even when we don’t see it. End 2013, First fell for Her of Spike Jonze, and devoted several articles to its manufacture. We are sharing them again to celebrate his birthday.
Her: Faced with this marvel, our heart could no longer stop beating (critic)
In HerTheodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) regains a taste for life thanks to a computer system with a raspy and sensual voice called Samantha.
The voice for those who haven’t yet understood is Scarlett. Spike Jonze’s film is therefore an improbable romance between a man and his computer. But how to make this romance credible? Can this work in cinema? Or, as he told us when he left: “Can a love story between two people of which only one is in the image work?“?
Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson at the Her premiere in Rome in 2013.
Yes, we’ve seen that before…
A man in love with a woman we don’t see on screen. It was the principle of Laura by Otto Preminger in which a police officer responsible for investigating the death of the eponymous character falls in love with the victim. Testimonies, Laura’s diary and especially her portrait – in truth that of the sublime actress Gene Tierney – give rise to this feeling for the deceased. Only spectators have the right to see the woman live and come alive thanks to the flashbacks.
Rebecca by Alfred Hitchcock is another example of a contactless love story. Maxim de Winter, a wealthy widower, marries a young girl and takes her to his home where everything recalls the memory of his first wife, Rebecca, including (again!) an imposing and disturbing portrait. The man is walled in his love for the deceased and projects his feelings onto the new bride, played by Joan Fontaine. The portrait and the new Mrs de Winter who becomes a reflection of the dead woman are the only representations of the beloved and deceased woman.
Absent women, crystallization, strangeness: everything is there, with the difference that they are dead and these films are less films of incommunicability than real ghost films. Her is rather a film about the incommunicability and solitude of modern man. The love object here is a technological program with its own personality but devoid of a body.
If we confine ourselves to the pitch, Her is not very original: Christophe Lambert fell in love with a key ring in I love you of Ferreri and in Thomas is in love, a young agoraphobic made contacts via Skype… So nothing new about Joaquin Phoenix falling for his smartphone. But Jonze has nothing to do with the socio aspect, what interests him is perception and sensation…
Yes, but it was a big challenge!
How to stage a sentimental soliloquy? At the end of 2013, the director returned to this big challenge in First.
“I have long wondered if a love story between two people of which only one is in the image could work. The script was misleading in a sense because, on paper, all the characters are on the same level. At this point, they exist only in your imagination. On the set, however, it was a different story… My naivety turned against me a little. There were days when we got what we wanted and others when I realized that certain ideas fell flat. During editing, I went through a period where I was convinced that Her didn’t work, that I had messed up.”
Audrey Fleurot doubles as Scarlett Johansson in Her
Yes, it works thanks to Scarlett
If it works so well, it’s mainly thanks to Scarlett Johansson, the woman who didn’t exist. Her broken, sexy voice is perfect. The computer, intelligent and emotional, goes through all the nuances, from laughter to sobs to irresistible sensuality. A vocal performance which earned its performer a prize at the Rome festival. And which gave the film a huge buzz.
It’s a breathtaking idea of staging: the most eroticized object in US cinema today, Scarlett plays a voice dissolved in the great digital void. We only hear her, but we never see her (we are forced to think about the last shot of Lost In Translation where we couldn’t hear what she was whispering to old Bill). The hero of the film only fantasizes about this megastar based on her voice, but the viewer inevitably has in mind the actress’s perfect physique.
Praising Scarlett should not make us forget the bluffing performance of her partner, Joaquin Phoenix. Like Tom Hanks who manages to make us cry with a balloon in Alone in the worldPhoenix is shocking in his face-to-face encounter with his digital tablet, the crazy vector of this tragic story.
Successful bet
Move to tears with the story of a guy who makes eyes (and then love!) at his smartphone? Make a virtual presence tangible? Filming the invisible? On paper none of this seemed to work. Five Oscar nominations later (and a statuette for best original screenplay for Jonze), the critics are won over. We are talking same here of a who film who “upset. Because behind the apparent harmlessness, the clumsiness of the replies or the polite humor emerge the cruelty and the spleen of a fable about an era – ours – which appears under cover, withdrawn into its past, shrouded in neutrality and doubt.”
We add that “Her may well be innervated above all by real and great challenges of staging, it is also carried by a fabulous script, the first written by Jonze entirely solo, which takes up a key theme of SF (the report from man to artificial intelligence) to transform it into an ultra-contemporary and ultra-relevant treatise on the human passions of our beginning of the millennium.“
Alone or accompanied, the editorial team invites you to (re)see this beautiful film which has just celebrated its 10th anniversary, and which is notably available on Première Max.
Trailer :
Sofia Coppola still hasn’t watched Her: “I don’t want to see myself as Rooney Mara”
