The Sundance Film Nobody’s Talking About (but Everyone Should Be)

We all appreciate a little admiration. Usually we just get scrutiny. People are ruthless critics; we observe one another, cataloging how we dress, the ways we style ourselves, and what social roles we fulfill. This goes quadruple for women, who live under constant pressure to comply with standards of beauty and bearing rooted in gender-based cultural mores.

That’s the quaggy ground Amanda Kramer sets her new film By Design upon, where one woman’s natural need to be seen collides with the travails of gender performance in a hyper-commodified world. “You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but Camille is a secure and satisfied person,” insists the narrator (Melanie Griffith), introducing the audience to Kramer’s weary protagonist like she’s playing matchmaker. In fairness, Camille (Juliette Lewis) does look secure, a product of casting Lewis, who carries innate self-assurance with her into most of her roles. Even at lunch, sitting between her moaning besties, Irene (Robin Tunney) and Lisa (Samantha Mathis), Camille exudes middle-class zen, soothing their regrets about their lives with misguided wisdom borrowed from Malachy McCourt. 

But By Design rapidly clarifies that though she’s secure, she isn’t satisfied. The moment Camille lays eyes on a gorgeous, impeccably crafted chair in a high-end department store, she becomes hellbent on acquiring it. When she returns to find that another customer beat her to the purchase, she makes a magical realist wish: to swap souls with the exquisite object of her desire. Split into spiritual halves, chair-Camille and Camille-chair are taken to their respective homes; Camille-chair lies prostrate on her mattress, and chair-Camille becomes a throne to Olivier (Mamadou Athie), a drop-dead handsome pianist for rent who’s harboring existential misgivings of his own.

The film cuts between Olivier and the two Camilles’ travails from there. Kramer brings us to this sundering moment after twenty minutes of inhabiting Camille’s perspective. For some, the leap from a narrative of feminist discontent to surrealist frivolity about the interiority of our “stuff” is too big to make. For others, especially patrons of Kramer’s other films, like Please Baby Please, Give Me Pity!, and Ladyworld, By Design will come as a delirious joy in its own league among American independent cinema. Kramer doesn’t have one idea in By Design; she has all of them, and packages them with the absurd humor, snappy patter, and aesthetic excesses that inform her work.

The film is frequently uproarious, peaking with a sequence where Aldo (Udo Kier), the chair’s eccentric creator, pitches a fit upon detecting Camille’s presence within its frame. Tunney, meanwhile, materializes with lethal line deliveries when least expected, like a tipsy punchline ninja. But the picture is heady and dense, too, reverberating so many thoughts that catching any one of them requires viewers putting in heavy legwork. By Design is about how we define ourselves by our possessions, and how friends, and even strangers, do the same; how we’re all one social interaction away from being treated as commodities rather than people; the way we anthropomorphize the objects that bring us the most happiness; and the utter devastation these fixations wreak on our wellness. 

This, perhaps, explains the failure of Sundance attendees to gravitate toward Kramer’s movies: they defy instant gratification and easy comprehension, and are thoroughly amusing despite layers of opaque flamboyance. By Design may be her most entertaining project yet, thanks to Lewis’ comic daring. She spends the bulk of the movie prone, an object acted on, like the chair itself; the notion of Lewis serving as a prop is chuckle-worthy at face value. But as By Design moves further along, Camille’s circumstances reshape into tragedy, and Lewis’ portrait of this woman, who makes the ultimate rejection of her predetermined function in society by refusing to abide by its rules, likewise cuts a bolder figure. 

Athie is her lovelorn, romantic foil, a source of cool in a place of camp. Even Olivier is susceptible to screwball outbursts, though. After all, the more we obsess about prized belongings, the more foolish we look. That’s part of Kramer’s point; that’s By Design.