Juliette Lewis Turns into a Chair

The logline for Amanda Kramer’s newest movie, “Via Design,” sounds each just like the setup and the punchline for a winking funny story. When a girl turns into resentful and enamored with a placing wood chair, she unexpectedly unearths herself changing into mentioned chair. Or quite, she finally ends up swapping our bodies with it, pressured to reside thereafter because the inanimate object she was once as soon as so enthralled through. Outlandish and absurd in equivalent measure, Kramer’s Sundance dramedy is so clearly running by itself quirky wavelength that once it sooner or later runs out of steam, you’re left wishing the “Please Child Please” filmmaker may’ve pulled off this high-wire act.

When Camille (Juliette Lewis) arrives at a chair retailer with two chatty buddies who slightly sign in her presence, let on my own her desires and needs, she’s hardly ever inspired with what she sees. The distance is extra of an artwork gallery than a furnishings showroom. Every unmarried chair boasts its personal highlight. None of what’s in inventory conjures up Camille. No longer the easy rocking chair and now not the quick stool. No longer the whimsically crimson one nor the intense yellow one … till this is, she is taken through what the movie’s narrator (Melanie Griffith) tells us is a “stunner” of a chair.

That’s the instant that may eternally exchange her existence. Via the next morning, her frame will lay limp on the retailer, and Camille will watch as her new frame — easy, wood, with armrests however no padding — is taken to its new house. There, she’ll fall in love with Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), the begrudgingly proud new proprietor of the clothier chair on which Camille had as soon as pinned her hopes.

“Via Design” follows now not simply Camille’s adventure as Olivier quickly turns into obsessed along with his new chair — sensing, in all probability, {that a} girl’s awareness is trapped inside it — but in addition the plight of Camille’s frame. Left at her condominium, her frame can do little else however stay nonetheless. (Even transposed to a brand new frame, what else would a chair do?) However quite than lift alarm, her listless demeanor finally ends up dredging up tough conversations along with her mom (Betty Buckley), her buddies (Samantha Mathis and Robin Tunney) and later nonetheless with a creepy, stalking neighbor (Clifton Collins Jr.). What Camille wasn’t in a position to do in her on a regular basis existence, her chair-like individual accomplishes with sudden ease. Right here she’s after all clued into the internal worlds of the ones closest to her. Alas, she’s now not there to witness it.

Kramer has obviously no need for nor allegiance to any semblance of realism. Hers is a movie whose stylistic thrives nod extra to avant-garde theater (to Ionesco, Durrenmatt, Sartre and the like) than to any grounded naturalism in movie. Her stagey units, vintage-styled cloth wardrobe, and stark use of lighting fixtures insist we relish the surreality of the complaints. From the clipped, Pinter-like discussion that opens the movie (“I desire a chair.” “For what?” “Visitors.”) to the deadpan narration that runs right through (“It’s really easy to go with a phenomenal chair,” Griffith tells us), Kramer units a droll tone for the movie that makes it transparent we don’t seem to be to take any of it too significantly. 

Despite the fact that, because it quickly turns into transparent, there are severe problems being drawn out. To envy a chair (or to covet one to the level Camille and Olivier come to do) is preposterous. This is, until, as Kramer does, you dig into what that would possibly let us know about those characters’ oft-crippling anxieties relating to who they’re, what they would like and the way they want to be perceived. It is just thru plunging us throughout the very ludicrousness of, say, Camille’s mom bonding along with her motionless, dead-eyed daughter that “Via Design” punctures thru what is anticipated of girls like Camille. May she in reality be a extra amiable individual when possessed through a chair? Does she finally end up finding out extra about her wants when being totally stripped of her personal frame? Kramer’s interest about such questions and her recreation forged’s talent to key into her twee existentialism make for an interesting if sooner or later relatively making an attempt proposition. 

The movie’s two leads do proper through what Kramer calls for of them. Lewis’ kookiness is grounded into Camille’s molasses roughly despair. She would possibly spend many of the movie not able to transport, however her expressive face and twitchy demeanor within the early scenes is sufficient to cartoon out who Camille is. In the meantime, Athie unearths heat in Olivier’s detachment, ably the usage of his deep voice for a stilted supply that makes this wayward guy really feel relatively at house bonding with a unmarried chair.

However it’s Griffith’s voiceover narration which easiest captures “Via Design”’s mixture of wry comedy and rueful drama. In her first position in just about 5 years, she makes the movie’s easy if atypical discussion (“Who wishes or appreciates Camille up to they do a chair?”) sound utterly standard. Her informal tone right through is what places you relaxed even if what you’re observing feels distractingly absurd (like trendy dance interludes choreographed through Sigrid Lauren, set to the darkly whimsical ranking through Giulio Carmassi and Bryan Frightening).

Kramer stays a grasp of her craft, in a position to dreaming up realities that exist unto themselves and bringing alongside a forged who give up themselves to her artistry. Lewis, Athie, Griffith or even Udo Kier (who seems in short because the chair’s clothier) are a deal with right through. And there may be, without a doubt, a welcome ambition to make use of fabulation to unpack recent questions on id and need. However Kramer’s wisp of a brief tale in the long run buckles below its personal weight because it careens towards its ultimate act and the witty ultimate line that is helping give the movie its identify. It is because “Via Design,” for all its playful seriousness, works infinitely higher as an highbrow workout than as a completed movie; in all probability higher nonetheless as a winking funny story than as a full-fledged affair.