Camille (Juliette Lewis) seems to have perfected the art of being present without ever quite being seen. But to be seen is to be known, and to be known is to be loved – or so one would think. Her weekly lunches with her friends Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney) are only exercises in polite alienation. Her friends talk around her, through her and about her, yet she feels nothing until she encounters and becomes transfixed by a beautiful wooden chair in a furniture showroom. Unable to afford it, she returns the next day to find it with a “sold” tag attached to it. If she cannot have the chair, then she must become it. Her consciousness abandons her human form and is transferred into the chair, which has been bought as a gift for Olivier, a pianist played by Mamoudou Athie, who brings a softness and genuine sincerity to his character’s erotic attachment to the chair.
The chair’s simplicity is stark against a showroom of much showier, eccentric pieces of furniture, and yet it is irreducible to any of the ways that it is seen. Its material existence beyond the meanings projected onto it – a beautiful piece of furniture, a status object, an artwork, a possession, a companion – brush up against the philosophical proposition of object-orientated ontology: the idea that through their very thing-ness, things exceed our access to them. Even a utilitarian object can never entirely be what it means to us. Kramer turns that abstraction into something potent, humorous and faintly uncanny.
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When Camille becomes the chair, she is granted access to agency within the very position of objecthood she might otherwise be expected to escape as a woman. To be seen might mean to be known, but might it also mean to be exposed, interpreted, used? What of the freedoms and pleasures of pure unknowability? Amanda Kramer approaches the boundary between the woman and the object who are being looked at and collapses that distance altogether, scrambling the supposedly rigid distinction between the animate and inanimate. Lewis, whose screen presence is defined by wonderfully bold, intense performances, is asked here to be still and inhabit a complete inertia as she is reduced to the barest flicker of expression, with an attention to embodiment that connects By Design to Kramer’s earlier Give Me Pity! in which identity is truly inseparable from performance.
What drives Camille towards the chair feels like a longing for the completeness of being perceived as beautiful, self-contained and desired. There is something deeply human in that impulse, something devastating in the fantasy that if we could only become the object of our own envy, we might finally escape the inadequacies of the self. Contemporary conversations about objectification can sometimes leave little room for the complicated pleasure of wanting to be seen, while Camille’s desire is to become beautiful enough that looking might finally constitute a form of love. “Everywhere I go, there I am,” the film suggests, and that is both its joke and its melancholy truth.
