We can now add a chair to this group.
By Design was the only MIFF movie I saw on Sunday night, the only of my four nights where I'm seeing only one movie. But so as not to waste a train ride into the city just for a single 90-minute chunk of weirdness, I followed it up with Zach Cregger's follow-up to Barbarian, called Weapons, which won't comprise any meaningful chunk of this post. In fact, its single mention has now passed, and you should not view that as any commentary on its worthiness for discussion or lack thereof.
By Design falls about halfway between Peter Strickland's In Fabric and Quentin Dupieux's Deerskin -- the two films in the above-linked post, if you didn't click on it (how dare you) -- in terms of my ability to connect with it, sharing a titular structure with Strickland's film and an absurd comedic sensibility with Dupieux's.
In short, it's the story of a woman who wants to become a chair, and then succeeds in this goal.
They actually swap bodies, in a playful skewering of the time-worn formula that currently has its latest example in movie theaters now with Freakier Friday.
The woman, played by Juliette Lewis, does not initially want to become the chair, though she does see some of the inherent pleasures of that lifestyle. Initially she just wants to purchase it to add to the existing furniture in her house. But oh how strong wishes can be fulfilled in strange ways in the magic of the movies.
It's a fairly ordinary chair. I think you're supposed to think this from the start, just how the red dress is pretty ordinary in In Fabric and the deerskin jacket is pretty ordinary in Deerskin. Here, I'll give you a look at it:
Oh no wait, I can't. There has not yet been enough published online about this movie, which played Sundance but does not yet have a release date (or a distributor? maybe? it doesn't yet have a proper poster), for there to be a solo shot of the chair available for me to show you. But trust me, it's fairly ordinary. There's some grace to the looping of its wooden armrests, part of an entire wooden structure to comprises the entirety of the chair. But really, it's just a chair.
And yet any number of people in this film -- first Lewis' character, then the man (Mamoudou Athie) who is gifted the chair as a breakup present from his ex -- are absolutely besotted with it, losing all composure when matters of the chair come up. Affected to a far lesser extent by this are Lewis' two besties, who verge on frenemies, played by Robin Tunney and Samantha Mathis. (Side note: I dated Samantha Mathis' half sister nearly 25 years ago.)
Even if Deerskin did not exist, Dupieux would make a solid comparison for what writer-director Amanda Kramer is doing here. The undercurrent of absurdity prompts bouts of surprised giggling with some frequency. For a while, I thought I might like By Design as much as my favorite Dupieux movies. (Rubber has the edge there over Deerskin.) Particularly funny are the scenes where other characters interact with Lewis -- motionless while inhabited by the soul of the chair -- as though she were actually present and not completely comatose. There's some light commentary in there about solipsism, our indifference to noticing whether others are present or not as we are so obsessed with our own personal concerns. You know, the kind of thing Weekend at Bernie's once poked fun at. Lewis' ability to stay as still as she does, with only a slightly rising and falling of her chest to show that she's breathing, is pretty impressive.
Where the movie lost me a little was in these discordant digressions -- I suppose you could say all digressions are discordant -- about side characters whose presence within the story didn't exactly make sense to me. Clifton Collins Jr. plays this stalker who is introduced fairly late in the story, and he gets this three- or four-minute soliloquy that isn't funny and that doesn't seem to have any place here, especially since it's primarily sad and not funny. That happened one too many times for me to give By Design a full-throated endorsement.
But it's definitely a thumbs up overall, and I really like the way it speaks to other films in my MIFF history -- even if they both happened on the same night six years ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment