Objet a

Stroking the soft deerskin of a device to aid walking, kleptomania, and reciting lists of extreme weather catastrophes are all erotic acts in Berlin-based Israeli director Ann Oren’s sophomore feature Objet a, an immaculately composed and deliriously kinky take on control, desire and a humanity facing imminent extinction that follows her similarly fetishistic and playful, buzzy debut fable Piaffe (2022), in which a foley artist growing a horse tail blurred the bounds between appendages and nature.

Screening in the Kinoscope section of the Sarajevo Film Festival on the close heels of its world premiere at Locarno, this is a queer and seductively chic catalogue of the designer trappings and fixations of a romantic couple who are both cutting-edge hand surgeons, which inhabits the same galaxy of formalist precision and obsession as the work of director Peter Greenaway. It is a film that is bound to divide audiences (some will be thrilled by its risque archness; others more welded to narrative propulsion will find its aesthetic contrivances and provocations superficially thin), but it should generate a fandom numerous enough to ensure a long festival life, helped by an all-out hallucinogenic and pulsating, magnificently realised finale.

Ingeborg (Aenne Schwarz) and Adam (Louis Hoffman) are thirty-somethings who, in an unnamed German city, cohabit in a meticulously appointed apartment where all the decor and appliances are a complementary shade of white or hazelnut, and worthy of a magazine spread. The in-synch couple, who share the same niche profession as medical specialists and have become darlings with the press as a result of their innovative experiments involving resewed fingers, even co-ordinate their outfits, eating their matching boiled eggs at the breakfast table together each day in black suits and fashion-forward, severe haircuts. Outside the austere, gleaming rooms of the hospital, where they sometimes steal steamy encounters, they vintage-shop, with a tactile enthusiasm and zealous fingers that gravitate to the textures of fur and leather, or visit a red-lit nightclub, where the titillation is enabled by swapping snaps from Polaroid photobooths.

But all is not harmonious ease with the duo of lovers, who despite their well-oiled routine thrive on transgression, and are dependent on an ailing planet in crisis for the earthquakes, wildfires and tsunamis that drive their “apocalyptic fetishism,” not to mention the ambiguous tension that a mysterious third party brings to their dynamic, when ardent thief Ingeborg meets Gaia (Piaffe lead Simone Bucio) by chance after falling during a hectic getaway on foot from the subway with a lighter stolen from a fellow passenger. Ingeborg goes back to work with a custom-made leg brace, and myriad new erotic possibilities for pleasure and a holistic reconnection with the environment. Not one to be left out, Adam, who fantasises about being treated like a doll, takes to wearing a wooden corset, another head-turning oddity that adds to the feats of costuming, by turns beguiling and alarming, by Carmen Di Pinto.

Oren revels in the absurd, with a mischief that offsets the avant-garde starkness of so much precision, and a penchant for wildness that brings the great equaliser of nature into the mix as mind-bending mushrooms start to sprout in astonishing places, bringing a sensual intensity shot by D.O.P. Juan Sarmiento G. on luscious and radiant 16mm. Psychedelic experiences are tough to reproduce on film with any real transporting splendour; for its visionary achievements in this area alone, not to mention its other peculiar diversions, Objet a is worthy of attention. This is a film of episodes and transmutations, in which progression comes less through a conventional dramatic structure of plot happenings, but small revolutions of the body and its curious interactions with a world of objects and beings through endless inventive and at times downright trippy interventions.

Director: Ann Oren
Writers: Ann Oren, Geoffroy Grison
Producers: Kristof Gerega, Fabian Altenried, Sophie Ahrens
Cast: Aenne Schwarz, Louis Hofmann, Simone Bucio, Georg Friedrich, Sofia Kokkali
Cinematographer: Juan Sarmiento G.
Editor: Hansjoerg Weissbrich
Sound: Persefoni Miliou
Music: Kyan Bayani
Costume design: Carmen Di Pinto
Production companies: Schuldenberg Films (Germany), Tarantula Luxembourg (Luxembourg), asterisk* (Greece)
Sales: Bendita Film Sales
Venue: Sarajevo (Kinoscope)
In German
95 minutes