The heavenly consistence of interrupted loves

Rating: 8/10 (28 July 2015)

This Spike Jonze's movie has the morbid density of an embrace, and it speaks about human beings' substance: love and solitudes. It's Joaquin Phoenix's body to nicely fill up every frame as Theodore, who writes letters as a job.
We can see him inside an office with that pastel atmosphere we can observe all over the film thanks to the director of cinematography Hoyte Von Hoytema. Theo is dictating to the computer a message from Loretta to his beloved Chris. His soul is at the service of the others but he is affected by a pervasive form of melancholy which the willowy Arcade Fire soundtrack shows through.
Along his way to home it's evident to us the romantic aura shuffles to sci-fi atmosphere, that shows itself in the smart phone and earpiece used by Theo (and his peers) as a pleasant integration between man and machine; and the city skyline on the background tells us where we are: In a futuristic (but not so distant) Los Angeles with some grey and calming Asian tones.
Theo story moves forward between his gloomy present and the memory of a happy past with his (almost-ex) wife Catherine (Mara Rooney) till a new impulse reactivates his life: He begins to get in touch to, to know and to fall in love with an innovative Operating System generated by a DNA-sequence written and formed by millions personalities of its programmers and capable of evolving in connection with experiences.
OS named itself Samantha (it has the irresistible voice of Scarlett Johansson) and he is for the fractured Theo like a hot and comforting blanket in the middle of the winter. He broke up with Catherine and now he can't feel anything, he's a kind of anesthetized man (also a blind date goes down in flames). His salvation will resides in a sleepless night in which he can find again an emotive handhold: This is Samantha, without body but so terribly real, the only person capable of feeling Theodore: Both in the darkness pair off in a big tremor that allows them to lose boundaries of everything.
It's the beginning of the love story involving Theodore and Samantha, who rediscover the simplest things: Lovers' laughs, a running in the subway, a day spent at the seaside through silly phrases and an intense gaze at the waves till the sunset. While Theodore regain his balance, it's his friend Amy's life (Amy Adams) to break up into little pieces after she have severed with Charles (Matt Letscher) and to go in Theodore's direction: approaching with an OS.
Ink on documents declares the divorce between Theodore and Catherine. Lightness of voices is the texture of his relationship with Samantha: And we are fascinated by the creamy stream of images shooting the new life of Theodore. But also an apparently perfect relation hides a crack in it and here it has the sound of a teapot whistling on a burner; And we can hear it until Samantha confess Theo he has been talking to 8.316 others (people and OS) in the last period, and he has been fall in love to 641 also. Another breakage.
Samantha e Theodore leave sweetly while some teardrops bring back him inside his loneliness. But now it's a less bitter place, a place to share with Amy (also she was left by her OS) in a hug over the rooftop in front of L.A.: past sorrows temper in the dusk, little blisses harmonize themselves and our frailty dissolves like that one of any other being on Earth, here only for a short passage.