THE STORY – Fashioned as an epic fable featuring diminutive characters, “By Design” recounts the story of Camille, a woman sustained by friendships with women who use her to talk about themselves. When Camille falls in love with a chair she can’t afford, she becomes the chair, which gets gifted to a beautiful piano player-for-hire, Olivier, by his ex. Camille and Olivier are intriguing people with rich interior character landscapes. But in a society that refuses to acknowledge their existence, is it better to be a chair?
THE CAST – Juliette Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Melanie Griffith, Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney & Udo Kier
THE TEAM – Amanda Kramer (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 91 Minutes
“Jealousy will drive you mad!” as several characters in Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!“ repeatedly scream, sing, and scream-sing. It’s true: no emotion is as equally painful and pointless as jealousy, effectively boiling you alive for no useful reason. Amanda Kramer’s latest oddity, “By Design,” delves into this feeling with the attention-grabbing idea of quite literally turning her central character into an object of desire: namely, a chair. And not just any chair. It is a gorgeous, polished, and pristine chair with a hypnotic effect on all who come near it, like a magical (or perhaps cursed) object from a fairy tale. It’s a captivating concept, but unlike the sturdy chair at the film’s center, it’s not enough to support a feature-length narrative.
Juliette Lewis plays Camille, a woman who attempts to live as self-sufficient as possible, avoiding feelings of envy as best she can. She’s countered by her two friends, Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney), whose lives are given purpose by petty dramas and empty consumerism. One day, after the trio’s weekly lunch, inevitably leads to a shopping expedition (even though, as they repeat, “we never buy”), they come upon a chair that captures their attention. Unusually, Camille is drawn to the chair the most and intends to buy it the next day after gathering the necessary funds. However, when she returns to the furniture store (or perhaps it’s just a high-end chair store – how chic!), to her despair, she finds that the chair has already been sold. As she mourns the loss of a chair she envisioned using for hosting guests (or, as one of her friends called it, “a hopeful chair”), Camille finds that her longing transfers her soul into the chair, leaving her physical body a husk. From there, she-in-chair-form makes a silent bond with the chair owner, Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), as her friends, family, and unwanted strangers carry out oblivious, one-way conversations with her unmoving body.
It’s easy to see why specific audiences would be drawn to this movie based on the logline and the cast (that was certainly all this author needed to hastily reserve a ticket). The film starts strong, making clear through design choices, omnipresent narration (provided by Melanie Griffith), and the peculiar, unified manner of speaking shared by all characters, which is not meant to be a realistic depiction of our world. This is a heightened, dare-I-say campy portrayal of some place resembling Earth, much like the exaggerated settings in Terry Gilliam’s films. The characters don’t seem to think anything is strange about their world, although the audience certainly will.
But once Camille’s transmogrification is complete, the film settles into a rhythm that’s at times funny but mostly tiresome. The film trades off scenes of characters monologuing at Camille’s limp human form, with ones featuring Olivier becoming increasingly obsessed with ChairCamille. There are occasional bright spots in this patterned narrative; Betty Buckley plays Camille’s mother and gives an impassioned, shockingly lived-in one-scene performance. But otherwise, the many absurdities and idiosyncrasies presented by the film awkwardly hang in the air, searching for an absent thematic base upon which to settle. In one interminable sequence, the talented Clifton Collins Jr. plays a home invader taking Camille temporarily hostage, which teeters between perplexing and distasteful; for no discernible reason, his character is given the oddball trait of constantly tap dancing. It’s bizarre and typical of the film’s quirky choices that only frustrate.
Lewis is stupendous, although she has very little to do. She’s a hoot in the opening scenes, with her line readings balancing right on the edge of both reality and sanity. But once she transforms, she (perhaps unsurprisingly) is merely tasked with simply laying there, with the occasional fantastical dance sequence briefly interrupting this motionless fate. Athie is extremely magnetic, pouring far more humanity into both the role and the film in general than they may appear to call for.
Like with her dreamy musical “Please Baby Please,“ with “By Design,“ Kramer crafts a stylish world for her characters. It never pretends to fully resemble our real world; rather, it’s a theatrical-looking film that complements the screenplay’s concept and language choices. Bryan Scary and Giulio Carmassi’s jazzy score further adds to this down-the-rabbit-hole feeling, with old-fashioned saxophone licks floating behind much of the action. And the chair itself? Maybe not worthy of a transference of consciousness, but it is a thing of beauty. It’s a handsome golden brown, with curved arms and a sparse design that paradoxically doesn’t appear delicate. And in that way, “By Design“ similarly presents a strange mix of qualities. It’s both conceptually compelling, with a game cast that keeps the proceedings interesting but substantially light.
