@Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival
Selected for the Next platform at the Sundance Film Festival 2025, the fourth feature film directed by Amanda Kramer deals with the human desire to find a deep meaning to life even in a world where everything seems to be shallow, superficial, almost pointless. At the center of By Design we find Camille (Juliette Lewis), a woman whose life is almost entirely built on the ephemeral.
After the usual brunch with her longtime, chatty friends Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney), Camille enters a design store where she falls in love with a very expensive chair. Following a series of misadventures Camille, unable to purchase the object of her obsession, finds instead a way to trade her soul with the chair itself. The story follows the voyage of Camille/chair passing into the hands of various characters, including Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), a musician who is devastated after being abandoned by his lover.
By Design is basically a short movie expanded to feature film, and definitely not in the best way. An idea that could have been intriguing if developed through a few scenes and a focused narrative, becomes instead a snooty and stylish exercise about basically nothing.The film directed by Amanda Kramer is objectively too pretentious for what it wants to tell. Does it want to be a blunt critique of contemporary consumerism and vacuity of capitalism? Fine, no problem. But why to make everyone and everything so irritating that in the end it is almost impossible to empathize with any of the characters?
Not even the chair? Kramer’s approach to her movie is some kind of brechtian detachment from Camille and the other figures. The director uses the simple and alienating settings in order to emphasize the equally stylized acting of her cast. The result is a series of sequences that challenge the audience without really giving them any kind of relief, not even the one usually brought by what is supposed to be a comedy. Maybe, we are not really sure about it.
By Design seems like a movie directed by Wes Anderson in a time when the director from Texas had a very, very, very bad day. Amanda Kramer uses that kind of geometric, visually calibrated mise-en-scene like a cold, destabilizing stage for the theatre of horrors that wants to provoke a disturbing reaction from the viewer. She voluntarily picks a surreal tone that ends up being more flat than intriguing.
The stretch of this idea into a non-story makes the narrative weak, just an addiction of scenes after scenes that don’t make a solid plot, actually quite the contrary. Switching to the cast of well-known actors, Juliette Lewis turns out to be paradoxically perfect for Camille’s role because she becomes quite annoying very early in the movie. Samantha Mathis, Robin Tunney and the others don’t really affect the final result with their performances, except maybe Mamoudou Athie who is at least convincing mostly because of his charisma.
In the end, there is no real reason to enjoy By Design. The movie by Amanda Kramer is not a ferocious attack at Western society, nor is it a satire about the emptiness of contemporary artists or forms of art. It is actually difficult to understand what this movie is, and the reason is that it is so over the top that it doesn’t allow the audience to get close to it. Why to try to understand or even just to emotionally connect with something that clearly doesn’t want it in any meaningful way? There is no good answer to this question. Better to move on and enjoy the next movie that will challenge us in a way that we can actually relate to…
Rate: D
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