In the wings of the London film festival, a group of young influencers are discussing their personal highlights. Klara and the Sun, says one, and her colleagues agree. It’s not just that the film is still so fresh in their memory, or that they have gathered today to meet its creators and stars.
Klara is funny and moving; it’s their festival favourite so far. I relay this exchange to Taika Waititi, the film’s director, who is sipping bottled water in a room down the hall. Everybody has a perfect film, just as everybody has a perfect friend, and they vary because everybody is different.
In the film, sick 14-year-old Josie loves her discontinued robot doll Klara, whereas most kids her age opt for brighter, shinier models. And the young influencers love Klara and the Sun – Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel – while most older critics vehemently, violently disagree. All of which shows that there’s no accounting for taste, that people are confounding, and that our hearts and our brains are not always in sync.
That keeps life interesting. It’s partly what the film is about. Nobody knows what the hell love is.” For what it’s worth, I loved Ishiguro’s distinctively spare and poignant source novel and am less convinced by Waititi’s screen version, which is certainly noisy.
Jenna Ortega stars as Klara, the perky solar-powered AI who plays soulmate to adolescent Josie (Mia Tharia), at a remote country house. She’s a warm splash of sunshine in an otherwise frosty environment, a fish out of water in a tragicomic sci-fi caper. But there is a glitch in the matrix; the component parts don’t align.
Waititi adds sugar and caffeine, pratfalls and one-liners. Klara misreads social cues and steers the family car off the road. She fears she’ll be shipped back to the factory and melted down for scrap.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
