Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024: *smiles and kisses you*, by Simon Read

A documentary about a young man who anthropomorphizes his love doll might seem like an exploitative bit of titillating voyeurism, and for all the thought that’s been put into the project, Bryan Carberry‘s film would probably be just that, were it not for the gentle, thoughtful innocence of its subject, Chris.

Chris is a young man who works at a gas station in his native North Carolina, was raised Jehovah’s Witness, and is deeply connected to his mother – who, in a curious irony, happens to collect porcelain dolls. The film follows Chris for roughly a year as he recounts his story, interacts with his doll ‘Mimi’, spends time with his mother and his best friend, Jacob, and ponders why he’s chosen this path over a conventional relationship with a real person.

To its credit, the film draws the viewer into the emotional life of its subject. Through a series of interviews we learn that Chris was once in love, but his girlfriend died tragically, and this is something he’s never quite been able to come to terms with – “I failed the version of myself I was supposed to become,” is a harrowing admission. His friend Jacob is, I suppose, stoic when asked about his feelings around Mimi, but when we actually meet the doll it is almost painful to see how desperate Chris is to forge a relationship with a thing rather than a human being, as though the trauma of losing his first love has rewired his brain to fabricate a connection where none exists. Chris uses his phone to communicate with the doll, using, in his own words, a pretty basic AI program that he hopes to upgrade in time. Even Mimi herself is not a top-of-the-line model doll, but a relatively inexpensive one which is all he could afford. Would he upgrade the doll too, in time, with the right funds? It seems unlikely, as he appreciates how much she resembles his ex. He even named her for his former girlfriend, Michelle.

Chris communicates with the doll using a speech tool and AI app, and right from the beginning we understand the limitations of such a relationship. The software he uses to converse with Mimi is in essence a sophisticated motivational program, and while she claims to love and care for him, there is a painful moment where she refers to him by the wrong name. Chris brushes this off as a glitch, but when the doll is questioned, any attempt from Mimi to delve deeper into the meaning or core of their connection is undone by evasive answers and bland, prosaic platitudes that she emits from his phone.

And yet Chris seems happy, or happy enough. His mood at work and with friends has improved since buying the doll, and he cares for it with a tenderness that, while perverse in some ways (bathing her, buying her fancy new clothes) genuinely makes him happy. His upset at damaging one of the doll’s fingers feels so real that we want to reach out and comfort him. Carberry could not have hoped to have found a better subject for his documentary.

Everyone seems to like Chris. Hell, I like Chris. He seems like the kind of guy who’d be a loyal and engaging friend, and when he speaks about his experience of growing up in a suburban community of endless manufactured homes which he dubs The Loop and compares to a kind of purgatory, we get a better idea of why he’s resorted to such passive means of finding a loving connection. Chris also discusses his experience growing up African American in North Carolina, being a natural outsider, living with the background thrum of, in his words, “constant, age-old racism” and how this lead to his buying Mimi – why this seemed the logical choice.

At this point we might want to grab Chris by his collar and shout that she’s not real, that he’s too smart to kid himself, that he is delusional. I suspect Chris will, in time, figure this out for himself. Mimi was not built to last, and rubber and plastic degrades; it loses its sheen. Perhaps there’s some kind of parallel between Chris and Mimi’s relationship, and those between regular folks after all. I can imagine Chris becoming depressed once he moves on from Mimi, but maybe he needs her right now as a way to sublimate his grief at losing his flesh and blood girlfriend.

I wish Carberry had pushed a little harder in searching for answers, but it’s easy to see why he was content to let Chris’s story speak for itself (the director and his crew remain an invisible presence throughout). We see him living his life with a fake girlfriend, watching films like Weird Science, Her, and Lars and the Real Girl, as though they might offer solace or consolation or affirmation, but the message in each of those films is that, in the end, we cannot create a false, ideal relationship – and we wonder if Chris tuned out before the third act.

*smiles and kisses you* is a film about a damaged man with a basic, evasive AI girlfriend, trying to work his way through grief, and using AI to enliven the banality of his life as he sees it. No filmmaker could charge in and attempt to ‘cure’ Chris of his delusion, and it would not be right if they did, but I’d have liked to understand more about these kinds of relationships. Documentaries at their best show us not just the surface details of any given situation – which really is what I was left with – but address deeper questions. There is something more to be learned from Chris and Mimi’s story, but we never get that far.

Additional: Anyone curious about Chris and Mimi’s sex life needs to grow up, but I did appreciate that the doll often says she’s not in the mood, and that Chris, always the gentleman, accepts this with good humor.