𝙵𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝙷𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚂𝚞𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚛𝚢 𝚝𝚘 𝙲𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝙾𝚏 𝙳𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚛𝚎

𝙾𝚋𝚓𝚎𝚝 𝚊

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙰𝚗𝚗 𝙾𝚛𝚎𝚗

𝙻𝚘𝚌𝚊𝚛𝚗𝚘 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

For me, Ann Oren’s Objet a begins with its title

and, inevitably, with Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s objet petit a should not simply be understood as the “object we desire,” but rather as that elusive cause that sets desire in motion and keeps it alive. We desire something, obtain it, and yet desire does not end; it shifts elsewhere, attaching itself to another object. Objet a turns this mechanism into a cinematic experience, releasing desire from the exclusive territory of the human body and allowing it to circulate between hands, gazes, images, movement, surfaces and objects.

From this perspective, the choice of hand surgery as the central character’s profession is particularly significant. For a hand surgeon, the hand is both the instrument of touch and an object of knowledge and treatment. With the hand, the surgeon touches another hand, cuts into it, manipulates its tissues and repairs it. Oren gradually uses this duality to destabilize the boundaries between medical touch, sensory touch and desire.

Crucially, this idea does not remain confined to the screenplay. It determines the film’s form. The cinematography repeatedly restricts our vision through controlled close-ups of skin, tissue, surfaces and objects. The camera seems less interested in giving us the totality of a body or a space than in fragmenting it, moving so close that vision begins to acquire an almost tactile quality. At certain moments, the camera no longer functions merely as an eye. It begins to behave like a hand.

The operating room is perhaps the clearest expression of this formal strategy. Unlike the crowded, highly functional reality of an operating theatre, Oren’s surgical space is radically minimalist. Much of the personnel, equipment and peripheral activity one would expect to see has disappeared. At times, the room resembles an installation or exhibition space more than a conventional hospital. What remains is the hand, the incision, the tissue and the surgical act itself. The film does to the body what it repeatedly does to objects: it removes context to make us look at the object itself.

This minimalism continues in the production design of the couple’s home. The architecture carries traces of another period, while distinctly contemporary objects inhabit it. Other objects seem suspended somewhere between the two. The result is a space that does not entirely belong to a recognizable time. Objects are never merely decoration here; each of them carries the potential to enter the characters’ relationship with touch and desire.

Costume, styling and the presentation of the male body extend this logic. His hair, face and physical proportions occasionally give him the quality of a sculpture, recalling the idealized male bodies of classical Greek statuary. Yet Oren reverses a familiar visual hierarchy: the male body increasingly occupies the position of the object being looked at.

This becomes more explicit as his relationship with his own body intensifies. He exercises obsessively, studies his muscles and repeatedly searches for his partner’s attention, only to discover that his body, however carefully constructed, does not automatically produce her desire. What begins as the cultivation of a conventionally desirable male body gradually becomes something stranger: a desire not simply to be desired as a man, but to become an object of desire.

This is why the film’s linguistic shift from “he” to “it” is so revealing. He does not want merely to be recognized as he. He wants to occupy the position of it—the thing.

In a film called Objet a, this distinction can hardly be insignificant. Objectification here is not simply something imposed upon a body from outside. It can itself become desired. The man wants to enter the field of his partner’s desire not necessarily as a gendered subject, but as an object capable of arresting her gaze. His carefully cultivated body therefore becomes another object in the film’s expanding collection of surfaces to be seen, touched and desired.

The woman, by contrast, is defined less as a body displayed for visual consumption than through looking, movement and touch. Her dance behind the curtain continues this corporeal language: the body begins to communicate before words do. In this sense, Objet a subtly rearranges the familiar relationship between the man who looks and the woman who is looked at.

The characters’ stealing of objects belongs to the same structure. Spoons and lighters are taken—ordinary, easily obtainable things that carry little economic significance for people in their position. The behaviour contains elements reminiscent of kleptomania: the value of the stolen object seems less important than the impulse and the act of taking possession.

The ordinariness of these objects is precisely what makes them interesting. A spoon has no inherent sexual meaning. Neither does a lighter. Had Oren chosen obviously sexual objects, the relationship between object and desire would have been far simpler. Instead, an everyday object enters the couple’s private erotic vocabulary.

The character can afford to buy a spoon. But buying and stealing are not equivalent experiences. Theft introduces prohibition, risk, possession and, crucially, the partner’s gaze. What may initially resemble an individual compulsion gradually becomes part of a shared game. Psychologically, the behaviour can be read through the language of impulse; within the relationship, however, it becomes eroticized.

From a Lacanian perspective, perhaps the spoon or lighter was never what was truly wanted. What matters is what emerges around the act of possessing it. The object itself is ordinary; desire removes it from the ordinary.

Oren pushes this idea further in the film’s unusual erotic nightclub, where a physical barrier separates people. Rather than requiring direct bodily contact—or even conventional verbal exchange—Polaroid photographs become intermediaries. Each person produces an image of themselves, an image they have chosen to present, and sends it through an opening to someone on the other side. The image itself becomes capable of carrying erotic charge.

In Objet a, the complete physical presence of another person is no longer necessary. An image of the body can temporarily occupy the body’s place. Looking, imagining, and the object itself can inhabit the distance between two people.

In fact, the film repeatedly places something between one body and another: an eggshell, the shell of a snail, a curtain, a physical barrier, a Polaroid, skin, an object. These barriers do not necessarily prevent desire. Sometimes the distance itself produces it. This is another point at which the film’s form approaches objet petit a: something always remains between the subject and the other, and perhaps it is precisely this gap that keeps desire alive.

The recurring image of the egg belongs to this structure. A hard shell is broken to expose something soft and vulnerable inside. The image finds an echo in the snail—a soft body emerging from a protective shell whose movement depends upon continuous contact with a surface. The snail must touch to move.

For me, this almost encapsulates the film’s corporeal logic. In Objet a, touch is not merely a prelude to sex. Touch is itself a language. To reach another person means emerging from one’s shell, encountering a surface and accepting contact.

Another productive contradiction appears when these medical professionals turn, for the recovery of their own bodies, toward someone outside conventional medicine. They treat other bodies through scientific knowledge, control, incision and surgery, yet when confronted with their own bodily experience, another path appears: movement and touch.

Instead of stillness, there is movement.

In the operating room, the body must be opened so that the doctor can see it. Here, the body must move so that the person inhabiting it can feel it. The tension between medical knowledge of the body and subjective bodily experience becomes one of the film’s central ideas.

At precisely this point, the film itself begins to change. Objet a starts within a clinical, minimalist form of realism but gradually moves toward sensory surrealism. The arrival of another figure in the couple’s life, followed by the forest, mushrooms and altered states of perception, disrupts the controlled order established at the beginning. Sensitivity to touch, surfaces and surroundings intensifies, while the boundary between external reality and subjective perception becomes increasingly unstable.

The forest is essential to this transformation. Earlier spaces—the operating room, the house and other carefully designed interiors—are constructed and controlled environments, spaces human beings have organized around the body. The forest represents almost their inverse: organic, irregular, damp, alive and filled with textures that cannot be controlled with the precision of a surgical environment. Mushrooms, skin, hair, soil and vegetation begin to replace the clean, regulated surfaces associated with medicine.

Eventually, traces of the forest and mushrooms seem to infiltrate the domestic environment and objects associated with the body. Exterior reality and sensory experience begin to overlap.

Surrealism in Objet a, therefore, is not decorative. It develops organically out of the film’s formal logic. As the characters’ perception changes, the cinema changes with them. The film moves from surgery to objects, from objects to theft, from theft to touch, from touch to movement, and finally toward the forest, mushrooms and altered perception. The further the characters move away from the medical control of the body, the less stable reality itself becomes.

It is as though once ordinary touch is no longer enough, ordinary reality is no longer enough either.

This is why the cinematography, production design, costume, locations and mise-en-scène cannot be separated from the film’s ideas. Its visual minimalism initially isolates bodies and objects from their surroundings, allowing us to see—and almost touch—them. Surrealism then begins to dissolve the boundaries between body, object and environment. The film’s form follows the same trajectory as its characters’ desire: control and concentration give way to searching, movement and finally an expansion of perception.

The question Objet a ultimately leaves me with is therefore not simply about sex, but about the structure of a relationship. We tend to explain why two people remain together through familiar ideas of love, intimacy and commitment. Oren proposes another possibility: perhaps two people can also remain together because the structures of their desire are compatible.

This couple has constructed a private language composed of touch, looking, theft, objects, movement, images, distance and play. Within such a language, even a spoon can enter an erotic relationship without possessing any inherently sexual quality—not because of its shape or function, but because of the position it comes to occupy within desire.

And this brings the film back to Lacan and to its title.

Objet a continually moves from one object to another: from body to spoon, spoon to lighter, object to photograph, photograph to skin, skin to egg, egg to snail, and eventually from these objects toward the forest and another mode of perception. None provides a final answer, because perhaps the object itself was never the answer.

Objet a is not, for me, a film about what human beings find erotic. It is a film about how desire makes something erotic. Its unusual proposition about sexuality emerges from precisely this distinction: eroticism does not necessarily reside in another person’s body. It can emerge in the distance between two people—in a gaze, a touch, an image, a fantasy, or even an utterly ordinary object.

And Oren does not merely tell us this. Through close-ups, minimalist mise-en-scène, production and costume design, the fragmentation of bodies and objects, and the gradual movement from clinical realism toward sensory surrealism, she gives desire a cinematic form.