Can You Love Jenna Ortega's Robot?
Buying a friend sounds like the beginning of a horror story. Klara and the Sun, opening in US cinemas on Friday, October 23, asks us to consider the purchase from the friend's side. Jenna Ortega plays an Artificial Friend who wants a home. Her desire to be chosen makes a better invitation than another film promising an urgent conversation about AI.
Klara joins Josie, played by Mia Tharia, and her mother, played by Amy Adams, in a family marked by loss and friction. Taika Waititi directs this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel. The machine's job is companionship. The awkward part is deciding what the humans owe her in return.
That premise puts me on Klara's side already. The family can buy her company; she has to hope they want it. You can be suspicious of the sale and still care what happens to the person being sold.
Waiting to be chosen
Ortega told Esquire that Klara is an older model, easily overlooked in the shop. She doesn't arrive with the glamour of a miracle product. She needs someone to choose her.
A friendship bought by one party begins with unequal power. One person can complain about the service; the other has been made to provide it. Treat the second person's longing seriously and the arrangement starts to look cruel.
There is a fair objection: a vulnerable character with Ortega's face can make a machine look very easy to love. Sympathy can be a sales pitch. An obedient companion who never asks anything of you is an appealing fantasy, and a film could sell that fantasy as readily as question it. That is the risk to watch for.
But refusing to care about a fictional machine on principle seems a miserable way to watch a film. A character doesn't have to be a sensible purchase, a plausible invention or a good idea for society to deserve our attention. The family gets to judge Klara's usefulness. We can judge the family.
One film before the new one
Try A.I. Artificial Intelligence before you decide. Its robotic child, David, is designed to love and taken into a human family. He can commit completely to a relationship that the adults get to reconsider. That imbalance is the reason to pair it with the new film.
If the prospect sounds unbearably manipulative, Klara's family drama may be a harder sell than its science-fiction label suggests. If you want a film to put that sort of pressure on your sympathies, this is a promising cinema gamble. The finished film still has to earn the tears its premise invites.
My vote is to take the chance. Watch A.I. Artificial Intelligence first if you want a test run, or read Ishiguro's novel for the original point of view. Then see what Ortega makes of being somebody's purchased best friend.
