If you want to know the true meaning of love, find someone that looks at you the way Mamoudou Athie looks at a chair in Amanda Kramer’s surreal, stylish and militantly absurd comedy-drama By Design. Both specific in its intent and mischievously opaque in its execution, this wilfully strange art project can switch from flip to serious in the blink of an eye, using a terrific cast to weave a trance-like state of oddness that somehow sustains to the finishing line. In Sundance terms, it fills a slot left open by Miranda July, America’s poet laureate of urban dysfunction, presumed missing in action since 2020’s Kajillionaire.
Like July, Kramer is concerned not so much with human beings as the space between them, opening on three women—Camille (Juliette Lewis), Lisa (Samantha Lewis) and Irene (Robin Tunney)—as they meet for their weekly lunch. Like an adult version of the Heathers of Heathers, the trio are bound by a notion of friendship that is stronger than the truth it is based on. An omnipotent narrator (voiced by Melanie Griffith) draws our attention to Camille in particular, saying. “You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she is a secure and satisfied person.” Indeed, Camille would appear to be the most sensitive and sensible of the group, hoping each week that this weekly catch-up will be “a salon of ideas”. Instead, says The Voice, “it is devoid of ideas and filled with crisis”.
These initial observations, however, are soon upended when, as is the custom, the three go shopping, a weekly ritual that takes them to a snootily high-end furniture store that, like all the other liminal spaces in the film (such as a nightclub that looks nothing like a nightclub), looks nothing like any kind of furniture store. In amongst all the random pieces on display is a wooden chair that somehow stands out from the others—“The stunner,” The Voice calls it—and Camille falls head over heels in love with it. But can she afford it? After some careful budgeting, she decides she can, only to return the next day find that the chair has been sold.
Camille is distraught and, ignoring her friends’ pleas to “move on”, she makes a wish to become the chair. This duly happens; at which point the chair is now the property of jazz pianist Olivier (Athie). The chair, it seems, is a breakup present from his girlfriend Marta (Alisa Torres), and it soon becomes the focal point of his sad bachelor apartment. The ‘real’ Camille, meanwhile, has become an insensible, comatose carcass, although no one seems to notice. Her mother comes in and unloads about the sorry state of her marriage, while Lisa and Irene come round for their weekly meetings. An intruder even breaks in to molest her; all are moved by what they see as Camille’s profound, dignified silence.
Like Camille, Olivier also becomes infatuated with the chair, even reaching out to its designer (the fabulous Udo Kier in a black cowboy shirt), who senses something different about the chair now that Camille’s soul is ensconced inside it. “I’m confuuuuused,” he says, before shouting “BLUE! BLUE!” and trying to repossess it, as if high-end furniture designers have the power to do just that.
The plot, as such—will Camille ever return to her body?—never entirely goes out of the window, but it is certainly not uppermost in the director’s mind. Instead, this is more a mood piece, with a strong visual look that recalls the Edward Hopper-esque aesthetic of David Lynch’s L.A. movies, notably Lost Highway and Inland Empire. As in Kramer’s last film, Please Baby Please, there’s a strong dance element too, although it never quite blows up in the way you think it might do. Similarly, after a very funny start, Juliette Lewis gets fewer opportunities to showcase her underrated talent for physical comedy; this isn’t her Substance, but a similar Demi Moore-style vehicle surely can’t be far away.
Commercial, then, it certainly is not, but festival audiences will surely respond to the film’s open-ended ideas about consumerism, status, and the baggage we accumulate both emotional and physical. “What do the things we love give back to us?” wonders The Voice. Kramer has clearly given this a lot of thought.
Title: By Design
Festival: Sundance (Next)
Sales agent: Range Media Partners
Director/screenwriter: Amanda Kramer
Cast: Juliette Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Melanie Griffith, Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney, Udo Kier
Running time: 1 hr 31 mins
