To see the work of Kazuo Ishiguro tackled on screen by writer-director Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit) calls to mind other putative matches made in hell: Sting trying to moonwalk, say, or Chopin’s Nocturnes performed by Mr Blobby. Excruciatingly misjudged and hard to take seriously, Klara and the Sun might be the most infantile film of the year.
Ishiguro’s 2021 work of dystopian science fiction – his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017 – was quietly minding its own business until this mind-meltingly dreadful adaptation occurred. Both concern a solar-powered robot (perkily played here by Jenna Ortega) whose dream comes true when she is bought as the companion for a dying teenage girl.
Whatever one made of the book (I was agnostic), it didn’t deserve to have Waititi come trampling all over it, first by milking it for a whole hour of simpering, saucer-eyed comedy that isn’t, even once, successfully funny. The film’s subsequent lunge for pathos is no more fruitful. When you’ve treated your audience as suckers for any old drivel, you can hardly complain when they’re simply past caring.
We meet Ortega’s Klara, an “artificial friend”, in a shop window, hoping against hope that she’ll be chosen by a customer. Eventually, she is picked out by lonely, lovable Josie (talented British actress Mia Tharia) and shipped to her ain’t-it-adorable home on top of a hill, production-designed to within an inch of its life. There, she receives side-eye aplenty from Josie’s hostile mother (a cruelly misserved Amy Adams) and the long-suffering housekeeper (Rachel House).
Giving us the point of view of a synthetic person ought to be interesting; it certainly was in Steven Spielberg’s fabulously unsettling AI: Artificial Intelligence. Burrowing deep down into the notion of love as a form of programming, that film holds up, 25 years on, as a profound, emotional modern classic.
Klara and the Sun is anything but. Ortega, essentially embodying a Manic Pixie Robot Dream Girl, is neither as creepy nor as poignant as Haley Joel Osment was for Spielberg. The layers of Klara’s consciousness are barely explored, while Ishiguro’s thoughts on the ever-evolving relationship between technology and humanity are tossed away like so much thematic confetti.
It’s hard to fathom what Waititi thought he was doing in playing things for laughs. What Ishiguro makes of this interpretation, we may never know. Meanwhile, it just grinds on: other robot characters speak with “special” voices that are borderline offensive, while the costuming choices throughout are garish, ugly and desperate. With artificial friends like these, who needs enemies?
Showing at the London Film Festival. In UK cinemas from October 23