By Design

Bluesky

It might be a soft toy, a phone or a dress, but the chances are that, at some point in life, you’ve set eyes upon something you felt you just had to have. It’s not a rational instinct. It exists in utter disregard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; it shames the humanitarian and can impoverish the frugal, yet it’s there nonetheless. And sometimes that desire is so intense that it goes beyond merely wanting to own the thing, becoming an intense form of identification, even to the point of wanting to be it.

Camille (Juliette Lewis) doesn’t have very much in her life. She works, she goes out to eat with her three friends, and occasionally she has to talk to her mother. She’s been single for some times, living alone in a studio flat with a futon and a large collection of shoes. But one day when she and her friends are idly wandering around a boutique collection of chairs, she sees a chair so beautiful, so simple yet so graceful in its form, that for the first time in a long long time she is taken outside of herself, longing for it as for nothing else. She doesn’t have the money for it. She goes home, tries to work out how she can afford it. In the meantime, someone else buys it. Distraught when she discovers this, she makes a wish, and somehow, perhaps through the magic of cinema, it comes true. From her friends’ perspective, she has fainted. In fact, she has swapped bodies with the chair.

If you’re familiar with Amanda Kramer’s work you’ll recognise this as one of hers straight away from the clothes, the make-up and the very particular style. She and Lewis are a natural fit. The chair may or may not appeal to you, but you will find it easy to believe in Camille’s feelings for it, which are supported by a musical number. Likewise those of its other admirer, Olivier (Mamadou Athie), who takes it home and cares for it – or, now, her. Experiencing his adoring glances, his gentle caress, Camille, freed from her previous ill-fitting form, is finally able to experience real closeness to a human being, and soon she is falling in love.

Meanwhile, lying on the futon in her flat where her friends gently discarded her limp body, the chair, in the form of Camille, has some unexpected encounters of its own. Nobody seems to notice that this unresponsive woman is not in fact paying attention to them, and Kramer spins this out impressively, building drama from a mixture of monologuing and imagination. As in her other films, she combines stage-like sets with a camera which is slow to move but quick to focus on a particular expression, a nuance of behaviour – or lack thereof. It is, perhaps, easier to attain a certain standard of respectable femininity when one has only the desires and aspirations of a chair. There is an implication that it’s better at being Camille than she ever was.

Sticking closely to the familiar format of the body swap film in spite of all this, By Design always promises a difficult ending. This provides more great material for Lewis as a woman who can only dream of being so desired in her own flesh. Along the way, there is also a delicious cameo from Udo Kier – one of his last roles – as the chair’s designer. Far from a one joke film, this is a fine piece of work throughout, elegantly crafted and appealing to the eye, even if it never quite lets you get comfortable.

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