Yesterday, Neville, a friend of mine, described to me a film he had watched recently. As the conversation progressed, I realised I too had seen this film but struggled to recall the title and principal actors. Neville had the same memory lapse. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I’ll ask Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot, Copilot, when I return home and let you know the title.’

Later, I started a dialogue with Copilot. Here is what transpired. Comments have been inserted retrospectively.

Me
What is the name of the film wherein a French music professor hears a boy playing a piano in the Parisian Metro and helps the boy become a celebrity pianist?

Copilot
That sounds like the 2006 film “The Piano Teacher” (La Tourneuse de Page), directed by Denis Dercourt. Music can really change lives, right?

Comment
The Piano Teacher is a 2001 film directed by Michael Haneke. The Page Turner, is a 2006 film directed by Denis Dercourt. Copilot has confused the two films but sorts it out in what follows

Me
Tell me more about “The Piano Teacher”.

Copilot
“The Piano Teacher” (La Pianiste) is a 2001 erotic psychological drama film directed by Michael Haneke. It’s based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Elfriede Jelinek. The film stars Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at a Vienna Conservatory, and Benoît Magimel as Walter Klemmer, her student.

The story revolves around Erika, a woman in her late thirties who lives with her domineering mother. Despite her composed exterior, Erika is deeply troubled, with her sexual repression and loneliness manifesting in voyeurism, sadomasochism, and self-harm. When she meets Walter, a young aspiring engineer and pianist, their relationship takes a dark and intense turn.

The film explores themes of control, power dynamics, and the destructive nature of human desire. It won the Grand Prix at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and both Huppert and Magimel received awards for Best Actress and Best Actor, respectively.

It’s a gripping and intense film that delves deep into the complexities of human behavior and relationships. Have you seen it, or are you planning to watch it?

Me
This is not the film I’m looking for. The setting is Paris. The music teacher is a male professor. The boy he discovers is from a poor part of Paris. The professor offers the boy a scholarship at his university but the boy has problems with drug dealers and associated violence in his home neighbourhood.

Copilot
Got it! The film you’re thinking of is “The Page Turner” (La Tourneuse de Pages), directed by Denis Dercourt. It tells the story of a young girl named Mélanie who, after a traumatic experience during a piano competition, grows up to become a page-turner for a famous pianist. The film explores themes of revenge and the psychological impact of past events.

It’s a gripping and intense film that delves deep into the complexities of human behavior and relationships. Have you seen it, or are you planning to watch it?

Me
Still not the film I’m thinking of. The film is very recent, maybe in the last five years, and the person playing the piano in the Metro is a male, not a female.

Copilot
I apologize for the confusion. Based on your description, the film you’re thinking of is likely “The Pianist in the Metro” (Le Pianiste du Métro), a recent French film released in 2020. Directed by Romain Gavras, it tells the story of a young boy from a poor neighborhood in Paris who is discovered playing the piano in the Parisian Metro by a kind-hearted music professor. The professor offers the boy a scholarship at his university, but the boy faces challenges with drug dealers and violence in his neighborhood.

Does this sound like the film you had in mind?

Comment
I interrupted the discussion with Copilot to conduct a preliminary search for this movie. Neither Google, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, DuckDuckGo nor Bing identified a movie with this title. Romain Gavras is a French movie director but there is no film title or synopsis anywhere in his filmography, including 2020, that even remotely matches the story my friend and I discussed. Based on this preliminary search, I replied…

Me
This film does not exist!

Copilot
Hmm, got me there! Maybe your memory is concocting the perfect movie. Ever thought about writing a screenplay? If not, what other types of films do you enjoy? Let’s brainstorm some real ones you might love.

Comment
I gave up with Copilot at this point.

–ooOoo–

I did, finally, find the movie but before I reveal the title, consider this. In its efforts to please me, Copilot invented a movie title and synopsis based on my initial description and played it back to me. The chatbot even threw in a French film director, almost at random it seems, to add credibility to its conclusion. Why? If a trivial search exercise can produce a fabricated incorrect result, could and would it do so if the search terms were more serious e.g., what are my chances of survival if I’ve contracted a life-threatening disease? AI-assisted search engines such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity are all the rage right now but how can we trust the results if even a trivial unimportant search can produce an incorrect result?

I finally tracked down the film using the web browser Google Chrome. The film was In Her Hands, directed by Ludovic Bernard, released in 2018, and starring Kristin Scott Thomas and others whose names are not so recognisable. Both Neville and I enjoyed the movie.

(^_^)