Objet a

The Berlin-based, Tel Aviv-born director Ann Oren is the great object fetishist of European auteur cinema. In her debut “Piaffe” she already had a woman grow a horse’s tail and made transformation an erotic adventure. With “Objet A” she pushes this fantasy to the extreme. Ingeborg and Adam are hand surgeons who grow human skin with mushrooms. In private they live in a cosmos of rituals, power games and fetishes. Ingeborg steals objects, Adam wants to become an object himself. Only an accident and the encounter with Gaia shake their order. Even Ingeborg’s new leg prosthesis suddenly becomes a coveted fetish, while climate change drives the earth into temperature extremes.

Shot on grainy 16mm, Oren turns hands, mushrooms, wood and skin into a sensual world in which every touch becomes a promise. Aenne Schwarz and Louis Hofmann play this couple with courageous physical abandon: naked, vulnerable, wild. Their craving for control is confronted by a world that loses its familiar forms in climate collapse. The erotic escapades thus become grief work for things that perhaps can no longer be saved. The way Oren weaves all of this into intoxicatingly compelling images makes “Objet A” one of the wildest viewing experiences at Locarno. A grotesque and melancholy film about desire at the end of the world.