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“Objet a” was Lacan’s term for the lack, the absence, that sets our desires into motion; an object-cause rather than a physical object. If it were the latter, a more apt title for Ann Oren’s delicious new film would
be “Object A to Z,” given the impressively vast range of things — everyday and obscure, tangible and intangible, sublime and ridiculous — that become fetish fodder in the course of its heavily stimulated 95 minutes. Following a couple of brilliant young surgeons who exert absolute control in the operating theater but surrender to wilder impulses in the bedroom, Oren’s equally off-kilter follow-up to 2022’s animal-instinct erotic fantasia “Piaffe” will hold onto that film’s select but ardent cult, and seduce further converts in global arthouses.
Oscilloscope Laboratories has already bought U.S. rights to this eye-catching oddity, which premiered — as did “Piaffe” — in Locarno’s main competition, and seals Oren as the kind of ready-minted auteur, fully distinctive in her style and obsessions, who’s sure to become a fixture on the A-list festival circuit. Formally and conceptually, “Objet a” reps a sleek step up in both ambition and execution for the helmer, abetted by performances of considerable daring, wit and physical abandon by German stars Aenne Schwarz (“All Is Well”) and Louis Hofmann (Netflix’s “All the Light We Cannot See”), the latter rocking about the most fungiform men’s bowl cut seen on screen since Anton Chigurh.
As personal style quirks go, it’s most certainly A Choice, but so is just about everything in the world of Ingeborg (Schwarz) and Adam (Hofmann), two specialists in complex hand surgery who live a life together of mostly scalpel-cut precision and routine: calisthenics and a boiled egg for breakfast every morning in their spartan-chic period apartment in an unnamed German city, equally crisp, tailored black outfits and rigid surgical discipline in the workplace. Scratch their jointly unblemished surface, however, and more interesting itches emerge: Ingeborg is a flagrant kleptomaniac, with a particular yen for stolen vintage objects, while Adam is a submissive who gets off on being objectified — “like a doll,” he specifies — by his partner, with an asphyxiation kink on the side.
The couple manage to keep these two halves of their existence — so different in temperature and tempo — strictly separate, until an uncharacteristic accident throws them off balance. After rashly stealing a man’s cigarette lighter on the subway, Ingeborg trips while making her getaway, resulting in a tibia fracture that threatens to take her out of commission for months on end. Witnessing the fall and on hand to help, by chance, is former patient Gaia (“Piaffe” star Simone Bucio), who immediately and wordlessly acquiesces to be the surgeon’s assistant throughout her recovery process, an appointment that rattles Adam. A chill descends in the bedroom, despite the erotic potential of Ingeborg’s new, custom-made leg brace, which allows her to keep working.
The brace, not coincidentally reminiscent of that worn by Rosanna Arquette in David Cronenberg’s “Crash,” is an exquisite leather-and-steel contraption crafted and fitted at a store named “Objet a.” Make of that what you will; Ingeborg certainly does. As her temporary disability awakens new avenues of desire, the watchful, stricken-looking Gaia is a willing outlet for them — while also bringing her own pheromones and fixations to the table, chief among them a connection to the earth (clue’s in her name) that causes fungi to sprout in all manner of hitherto clean crevices.
If Adam feels left out of this at first, Gaia’s curious spell eventually brings him into the fold, as does his own object equivalent to Ingeborg’s brace: a timber corset, exquisitely curved and planed to his anatomy, and one of the film’s great triumphs of design: Audrey Hernu’s sets and Carmen Di Pinto’s costumes throughout are alike in immaculate minimalism charged with sensory possibilities.
Like “Piaffe,” which starred Bucio as a shy young woman sexually emboldened when she grows a horse’s tail, “Objet a” doesn’t sensationalize its erotic absurdities, but takes sincere, inquisitive, sometimes mirthful pleasure in them — as the film explores, with little judgment and some degree of awe, the ways in which the human body and its urges correspond with the living, growing, reproducing ecosystem that surrounds us. Schwarz and Hofmann’s superb, intricately physically performances serve that thesis, as each actor’s tightly measured body language shifts and slackens and tingles in response to the film’s febrile, intensifying mood; even from the start, DP Juan Sarmiento G.’s gorgeous 16mm lensing is ahead of the characters in its tactile warmth, but is increasingly flushed and saturated with fleshly pink and chlorphyll green.
Oren’s work continues to be determinedly sex-positive, but not in an emptily exuberant or sloganeering way; in line with its characters, “Objet a” takes a holistic, scientific approach to sensual abandon, advocating not just what feels good for the individual but for the environment too: The more we control and restrict our desires, it suggests, the more we remove ourselves from the natural world, and all the uncanny, exhilarating, occasionally orgasmic things it has to offer.
