Love-ins with the live-in doll

Despite the fact that the female lead is played by a blow-up sex doll, Lars and the Real Girl is that film — and crucially, there’s no sex.

In the best romances, it’s the proximity of bodies that arouses rather than full-on shagging. Erotic heat comes from the way one character looks at another, because tension is everything. You’ve got to be gagging for the characters to get together.

Lars (Ryan Gosling) is sleepwalking through life after a damaged childhood. He can’t connect with women of his own age. But then he orders Bianca, a stunning, half-Brazilian, half-Danish religious missionary (aka the blow-up doll) from an online company called Real Girl. To his family’s consternation he persists in believing she is a live human being. And, what’s more, he blossoms.

Chastely, he and Bianca sleep in separate bedrooms but she gives him the confidence to go out into the world, where the inhabitants of his Midwest town go along with the fantasy, because Bianca triggers something in them, too. Soon they’re projecting their own inchoate desires onto the doll: brushing her hair, taking her to parties, inviting her to do charity work.

The town therapist (brilliant Patricia Clarkson) knows Bianca has been sent for a reason. In one dazzling scene she tries to get the touch-phobic Lars to accept human contact. It’s amazingly sensual. And as we see Lars gradually out-grow Bianca’s charms in pursuit of a flesh-and-blood relationship, it becomes a lesson for all those men who end up addicted to internet porn.

The film is often very funny. The acting is first-class, especially Gosling, who never patronises his character, and our own Emily Mortimer as his pregnant sister-in-law. But the great joy of the Oscar-nominated script — by former Six Feet Under writer Nancy Oliver — is that it handles the delicate issue of mental health without judgment or fear.

Lars And The Real Girl
Cert: 12A