‘Objet A’ Locarno Review: A Bizarre Anatomy of Sex and Desire

Ingeborg and Adam are plastic surgeons specializing in hands. They’re also a couple. Or something like that. Cold and expressionless, they move through their days in a robotic, detached and elegant manner, from the moment they wake up until they go to bed. The only communication between them seems to take place in the operating room, when they silently pass each other the specialized instruments of their trade. They have won awards and appear in magazine profiles for their professional achievements. Outside that routine, they don’t seem to have much of a life.

One particular job, however, begins to unsettle them, pulling them out of their carefully controlled cycle. It involves Gaia (Mexican actress Simone Bucio), a young woman who needs to have a strange sixth finger removed from her hand. The procedure is clean, apparently straightforward, and successful. Yet for some inexplicable reason, Gaia fascinates them, almost seduces them. Maybe it’s because she wants to take the amputated finger home with her. Or perhaps it’s the enormous amount of hair growing from her armpits, which seems to have an erotic effect on them.

Little by little, and through the dry narrative system devised by Oren—a former performance artist making her third feature—we begin to get to know them. Ingeborg (Aenne Schwarz) seems particularly fond of stealing things, tongue twisters, leather, and running her tongue over whatever happens to stimulate her at any given moment. In fact, it’s an ill-fated attempt to steal a lighter that leads to an accident, after which she ends up buying a kind of prosthetic leg whose function is somewhat unclear but which proves highly stimulating to her.

Adam (Louis Hofmann), meanwhile, has a thing for certain hard materials—wood, for instance, seems to fascinate him—and he will do whatever it takes to put it on his body. His favorite sexual game appears to involve getting aroused by saying the names of specific surgical procedures out loud. Strange people, yes, and this is only the beginning of what this peculiar mixture of drama, comedy and satire has in store, flirting at times with the Cronenbergian tradition of body horror.

Objet A is a distinctly Germanic account of the activities and entanglements this couple gets into after Gaia enters their lives as an assistant and something resembling a lover. Their professional, clean façade begins to crack, their precise fetishes come to the surface, and they even lose the sense of trust they seemed to have when we first met them. Could their particular obsessions be a response to climate change and the feeling that the world is coming to an end? According to a magazine article featured in the film, the two things may be connected.

Objet A wants to be disturbing, uncomfortable and funny all at once. Or, at least for me, certain of the couple’s obsessions and peculiarities were genuinely funny. This is a film that makes identification difficult, preferring to maintain a clinical distance from its characters and observe how they cope as the world around them begins to fall apart. What they do is not necessarily dangerous or problematic. At most, it is simply a little bizarre. And one of Oren’s smartest choices is never to mock them or treat them as curiosities. They are simply a couple with their own highly personal and idiosyncratic obsessions, which rarely seem to connect with one another.

The film creates much the same sensation as its protagonists: a certain degree of interest, some confusion, very little emotional connection—a forbidden word in this kind of register—and, toward the end, the feeling that we are gradually being left outside whatever it is the film is trying to tell us. Objet A is an intriguing film about the strange paths of sex and desire, a film about obsessions, fetishism, the end of the world, and the vast number of unexpected and erotic functions that a prosthetic leg or a wooden corset can possibly have.