
Those gestures by Jonze and Barrett turn “Her” into an extended and surprisingly kindhearted meditation on how we grapple with major change - personal, cultural, technological and architectural. The city is stuck between two realms just like Theodore, with his feet on the ground in Los Angeles and his mind and heart in a digital reverie. in the past but haven’t quite reached the future many of us are hoping for and working to create.Īlternating between scenes shot in Los Angeles and Shanghai gives this limbo cinematic form. But the process of building a mature rail system has a long way to go we still love our cars. This is a city caught in limbo between two very different kinds of urbanism: between its private and car-dominated past and denser, more public and more connected future.Ĭlearly we are heading toward a Los Angeles with more and taller skyscrapers, livelier sidewalks and better public transit. And Jonze doesn’t just do it simply because Shanghai looks more believably dense and developed than present-day Los Angeles.įilming in Shanghai also allows him to capture something significant about the character, and the anxieties, of contemporary L.A. The generic quality of its downtown streets in particular has made it attractive to directors of feature films and car commercials alike.īut another city standing in for the Los Angeles of the future? That’s new, or at least extremely rare.

The action captured on film stands in for real life.Īnd Los Angeles has always stood in on-screen for other cities. Actors stand in for characters made up by screenwriters. Surrogacy, of course, is a basic ingredient of moviemaking. In the same way, Shanghai stands in for the future Los Angeles. Theodore stands in for the people who hire him, in his job at the candy-colored offices of a company called, to ghost-write personal notes to friends and relatives. A young woman stands in for Samantha in what turns out to be a disastrous attempt at sexual intimacy between man and software. The operating system, called Samantha, stands in for the real girlfriend Theodore can’t seem to find after his divorce. The double setting also highlights the movie’s interest in themes connected to surrogacy: to one person or thing standing in for another.
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The filmmakers also shot a number of scenes in Shanghai’s Pudong district, which not only has an impressive collection of new skyscrapers but is laced with pedestrian sky bridges that allowed Jonze to film his actors without worrying whether the cars in the background looked futuristic enough.
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Jonze spoke at some length as he was preparing the movie with the New York architect Elizabeth Diller, whose firm is designing Eli Broad’s new contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles. Barrett, digitally plumped up the city’s existing skyline. To create this colorfully remade L.A., Jonze and his production designer, K.K. It’s as if a benevolent Robert Moses, a planning dictator with a green agenda, had taken over the political realm in Los Angeles. The sidewalks and the rail stations are crowded with people.
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