Really I shouldn’t be surprised that a film that is about a woman who wants to be a chair ends up being an absurd and surrealist set piece.

Everyone around me said, “Well, it IS an Amanda Kramer film”, and I feel bad that I don’t actually know what that means. Apparently Please Baby Please is streaming on something so I should really check that out.

Juliette Lewis plays Camille, a woman of middling years who has nothing much in her life other than her weekly lunch with her insipid and pretentious friends, Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney). Her life is spent going through the motions and scrimping and saving just so she can afford the weekly lunches because she feels she needs to have women friends in her life.

When she decides they should go furniture shopping, they find a shop that has many many types of designer chairs and Camille really wishes she could find one that she loves. She envies the beauty of an object, because it attracts the love and gaze of so many people and this is what she wants in her life. When she sees a particular wooden chair, she desperately wants it (but as her friends say, “We never buy!”)

And so begins an absurd story where she becomes the chair and her body is left behind. Her friends and her mother like her better when she is comatose on the floor of her room because she’s a much better listener. The chair is bought by a woman, Marta (Alisa Torres), who gives it to her ex lover Olivier (Mamoudou Athie) and he, desolate at being left by Marta, senses that the chair has a soul and jealously loves and guards it.

Each scene is as if it is on a stage, with theatricality and dramatic lighting and stilted dialogue. There are dancers who occasionally perform elements of the narrative and it feels like an avant garde fringe play that you have stumbled on some late night in a foreign town. As one review on Letterboxd by Jordy said, “The Susbtance if Margaret Qualley was a chair” and I think this perfectly sums up its visual vibe.

It’s often diverting, particularly the inherent humour from well known actors like Lewis and Mathis and Udo Kier playing such exaggerated characters. The underlying message is pretty bleak though, everyone is shallow and not really listening to each other, the most anyone can hope for is to be loved by another person even if that means pain and jealousy. Objectification seems to be the goal and this seems a particularly sad take on our lives.