Her arms are caressed. Her legs are seductively untied from binding twine, the fabric released. Her body is licked by a besotted lover.
She is a chair. Camille (Juliette Lewis) is a chair.
What is happening here? I asked myself that many times—chuckling, incredulous, baffled—while watching By Design. I don’t know if I’ve seen a movie as bizarrely indescribable as this since watching Jean-Luc Godard’s insufferable version of King Lear years ago in college (a film that, all this time later, my old roommates and I can still quote). Unlike that film, however, By Design is strangely amusing, empathetic, and watchable.
Juliette Lewis, in human form, plays Camille. She’s a weary woman who doesn’t seem to really like her best friends (Robin Tunney and Samantha Mathis), finding them self-centered and bitchy. After their weekly lunch, they go to look at a furniture gallery, and she becomes smitten—obsessed, really—with what (to my eyes) seems to be a relatively simple yet elegant wooden chair. The women at the gallery scoff at Camille’s interest. The chair is, after all, very expensive.
Camille goes home and obsesses, deciding that even if she can’t afford it, she MUST have it. The next day, Camille is dismayed to see that it is sold. In a desperate act, she wish-wish-wishes on the chair, and voilà! She IS the chair!
The chair has been bought by a woman as a breakup parting gift for her ex, a sweet, dejected man named Olivier (Mamoudou Athie). Olivier notices the chair. Then he takes a keen interest, running his hands over the meticulously crafted piece. Then he curls into its sweet embrace. When he starts to take the chair to dinner parties, well, even his friends start to notice.
By Design is narrated by Melanie Griffith, who I kept hoping would have the chair say, “I have a design for sitting, and a bod for sin,” in her best Working Girl voice. The narration is sympathetic to Camille—after becoming the chair, Camille’s shell of a body, still breathing, eyes unblinking, hangs out with her friends and is visited by her mother (Betty Buckley!). Camille’s limp body slumps across her bed while everyone prattles along in her presence, marveling that she is such a good listener these days.
Juliette Lewis, as a forlorn, lonely woman with a hairstyle that seems to have lost its way trying to achieve a glamour she doesn’t have, spends much of the movie in a catatonic state, expressing a sort of incredulous dismay that her almost-lifeless body, to those around her, isn’t that much different than it is when fully occupied. To her, being a worshipped, inanimate object is vastly more desirable. At least those around her pay attention to her as a chair.
Yes, this movie is super-odd. The dialogue is often stilted and stagey. There’s occasional interpretive dance with no explanation. For a movie called By Design, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the costumes, production design, and hair design are fantastic. From the opening credits, it looks and feels like flipping through a design or fashion magazine.
This is the kind of movie that will either work for you, as it did for me, or very much will not. I found it to be a strange, amusing, and faintly melancholy take on our obsession with beauty, attention, and perfection. Others will probably find it infuriatingly arty. I can already picture people leaving the theater in confused disbelief. “Didn’t meet expectations!” I mean, it’s a movie about a woman who wants to be a chair. That alone is either the selling point… or it’s very much not.
