If you’re a fan of overly theatrical, archly campy cinema, then sit down (pun very much intended). I’ve got a film for you! Filmmaker Amanda Kramer first came to my attention with her 2022 feature, Please Baby Please, which showcased her distinctive voice as a cinematic absurdist. Combining John Waters-esque emphatic, over the top performances with the formalized sensibilities of the two English Peters (Strickland and Greenaway), who brought us In Fabric and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover respectively, among other titles, Kramer has filtered this through her own voice to bring us By Design. Yes, the words “borderline pretentious”, “avant-garde”, and “hyper-stylized” come to mind. It’s also queer without being overtly so.
Juliette Lewis plays Camille, a woman who feels unseen by her family and friends. Robin Tunney (Irene) and Samantha Mathis (Lisa) play two such friends who chatter on endlessly at lunches while either ignoring or demeaning Camille. Theirs is a union based on petty jealousies, captured best by the repeated line, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
On a lark of a shopping trip, the three of them encounter a beautiful chair at a furniture store. Mesmerized by its beauty, Camille decides she must have it, but she misses the purchase window and it ends up in the hands of a mild-mannered musician named Olivier (Mamoudou Athie). Through an unexplained sequence of events, Camille swaps identities with the chair and experiences adoration for what feels like the first time in her life. It’s Freaky Friday for the art film set. While Olivier falls deeply in love with an inanimate object, Camille lies catatonic back in her apartment. If only her loved ones could locate the chair and reverse the curse.
I won’t spoil this initial setup further except to say that we learn more about Camille through a visit from her mother (Betty Buckley), a stalker (Clifton Collins Jr.) and we also meet the chair’s designer played by Udo Kier in one of his last film roles. Melanie Griffith’s narration also fills in the blanks with her warm delivery. With several modern dance numbers and a fantastic Juliette Lewis freakout to boot, the film remains open to interpretation. It can be about standards of beauty, loneliness, feeling seen in a world which renders one invisible, body horror, or maybe it’s just a movie about a really cool looking chair.
Clearly Amanda Kramer doesn’t want to make the standard indie made up of handheld, gritty imagery and naturalistic performances. She subscribes to a Kabuki level of presentation with a bit of Fassbinder or even Francis Ford Coppola in full One From The Heart mode. Lovers of warm and fuzzy storytelling need not apply. The spare sets and truly bizarre hair, makeup and costuming choices, along with richly colorful cinematography from Patrick Meade Jones, Kramer’s frequent collaborator, add up to something more akin to performance art theater. Still, Kramer keeps things wonderfully visual with gorgeous dissolves and other dreamy edits. Despite all of these highly distancing techniques, I still felt something by the end, thanks especially to the sheer magnetism of Juliette Lewis, who can literally lie still for over an hour yet keep you mesmerized. Some may view By Design as nothing more than a didactic filmed thesis on feminism or the male gaze, but I have a feeling anyone who sees this will connect with it on unexpected levels, or maybe they’ll walk out. In Amanda Kramer’s one of a kind world, all reactions seem valid.
By Glenn Gaylord, Senior Film Critic
By Design opens in select theaters on February 13th.
For more film reviews by Glenn Gaylord subscribe to his new YouTube channel here ——> GLENN HATES EVERYTHING
Leave a Reply