BY DESIGN Review: Beautiful and Heartbreakingly Singular

Amanda Kramer's last feature, Please Baby Please, was lauded by many, including our own Shelagh Rowan-Legg, but I found it too academic and built on references to elicit any emotion. It's a movie that I was able to understand without feeling, an experience that left me wary of engaging with her work in the future.

That wariness remained while being overpowered by curiosity about her new film By Design, in which, as the logline tells us, "a woman swaps bodies with a chair, and everyone likes her better as a chair." The fact that the woman is played by Juliette Lewis and the cast is rounded out by the likes of Clifton Collins Jr., Mamoudou Athie, and Melanie Griffith ensured that I needed to see it.

It's a reminder to never write off a filmmaker based on one movie.

By Design isn't any more subtle than Please Baby Please, but rather than have characters deliver monologues that sound as though they memorized a section of a queer theory text, here they speak plainly about their desires, fears, and judgements. It also helps that Melanie Griffith narrates the entire film, a device that allows Kramer to say some of the big meaningful things she wants to say with her film, without needing to force these things to be spoken out loud by characters.

Those big meaningful things are also largely (though not entirely) about characters' inner worlds. Before Lewis's Camille makes her transformation (by abandoning her body and moving her soul into the chair), Griffith tells us "she's never been able to just sit there silently and still be seen, loved." And after she's become a chair, the narrator tells us that Camille "is valuable, that's new."

Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), who gets the chair Camille has become as a gift from his ex, gets the same treatment from the narrator. She tells us that after the break up "he tried to keep friends, [but] friends didn't really suit him." When a literal fight breaks out over the chair, she gives us insight into both their feelings. For Camille, "everyone, men, women...fighting to get closer to her, it's heaven," and in this moment Olivier "allows himself the luxury of feeling like a man who owns a woman who everyone he knows wants to fuck."

Even Collins Jr., who only has one scene in the film as an assailant who has been stalking Camille and finally attacks, is granted interiority through the narration. Having left her body behind, it is lifeless, unmoving and carrying an empty facial expression, which means "she doesn't scream or beg to be spared." It's a "disappointment for him," and makes him feel like "an absolute failure." Which moves him beyond his initial impulses and leads him to a monologue about his romantic failures, and as Camille remains silent and unmoving, he says "you're so kind tonight."

Dissecting these gendered relationships is a throughline in Kramer's work, and is most affecting and thought provoking here as it's borne of the emotional emptinesses these relationships can foster, due in large part to the social importance and pressures laid upon them. And it's not only relationships between men and women, arguably equal focus is given to relationships between women. A scene with Camille's mother that somewhat mirrors the scene with Collins Jr. is particularly incisive and painful.

Many of the very explicit lines in the film about these relationships are in dialogue rather than from the narrator, as if to highlight their social and external aspect. As one character says during the dinner party that leads to the fight over Camille, "conversation is pressure." Perhaps that's why even when revealing plain truths about their interiority, all the dialogue in the film is so performative.

The spaces in which the actors perform is also far from reality, with the exception of the show room where Camille and her friends first find the chair, a retail space that could be laid out just so in our world as well. The characters' apartments are perfectly minimal, with sunlight striking their matching furniture sets at extreme angles through the blinds. Two of the three exterior scenes take a moment to register as exteriors because the sets are so composed and the shots so locked to ground level that they impose the feeling of a ceiling above.

Kramer hasn't given up her stylistic visions by any means, she's simply set her sights more firmly inward; probing characters' emotional worlds based on the social factors that build them and tear them down. By Design is a truly magical piece of filmmaking, a visually stunning movie made for anyone who has ever collapsed in on themselves because of others.

The film opens Friday, February 13, only in movie theaters, via Music Box Films. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.