On attachment, materialism, and the things we choose to live with, Finn Christian Peper explores how desire moves between objects and people, and why sometimes the things we own know more about us than we realise.
There are things we keep for no good reason. A chair that has followed us through three apartments, a jacket we haven’t worn in years, a piece of furniture we would somehow hate to leave behind. They are not necessarily valuable, nor particularly useful anymore. But try getting rid of them. Suddenly, it feels personal.
In Objects of Desire, the second film in Pedestal’s Dear Maria series, director and cinematographer Finn Christian Peper takes this familiar attachment to an unexpected extreme: falling in love with a TV stand. Following heartbreak, the protagonist escapes to a place where time seems to stretch endlessly, bringing along the one thing he trusts: his TV stand from Pedestal. He spends his days by the water, alone with his thoughts and his object of affection, until a woman swimming in the ocean catches his eye. Just like that, something changes.
It’s a funny premise, and Peper knows it. But there’s something unexpectedly familiar about watching someone become so attached to an object. Many of us hold on to things long after their practical purpose has faded, simply because they’ve become part of our lives. Over time, the object itself becomes inseparable from the memories we associate with it.
“For me, the product itself plays a secondary role in the story. What I find interesting is how we, as humans, become attached to objects. This can stem from good design, storytelling, or the memories and emotions we associate with them.”
A TV stand is designed to hold a screen, but the object at the centre of Peper’s film gradually becomes something else: a familiar presence, tied to a particular moment in someone’s life. It’s a perspective that brings the film into an interesting dialogue with Pedestal, whose designs turn an everyday necessity into part of the living space. The object remains functional, but its meaning extends beyond what it was made to do.
Peper has always been drawn to irony, and here it gives the film its lightness. The absurdity of falling for a piece of furniture never quite disappears, even as the story begins to feel unexpectedly relatable. “I’ve always liked introducing a certain level of irony into my films, which is also present in Objects of Desire. Falling so deeply in love with an object might seem absurd to some, but I believe most of us can relate to a moment in time when an object became tied to a meaningful memory in our lives. I wanted to explore that feeling and build the film around it.”
But there is another side to all this wanting. Our attachment to things can be comforting, even necessary, yet it can also become part of a culture that encourages us to keep looking for the next thing that will make us feel complete. Peper is interested in that contradiction, too. Beneath the playful premise, the film questions our tendency to accumulate, replace and endlessly strive for more. “Through its ironic undertone, the film also raises questions about materialism and the culture of constant striving that shapes the society we live in. Perhaps it’s a reminder that the best things in life aren’t necessarily things at all.”
The film never rushes to make its point. Instead, it lets us sit with the protagonist in the heat of an apparently uneventful summer. The days drift by, the landscape offers an escape from the life he has left behind, and the stillness begins to feel almost like a state of mind. There is a particular scene in which he stacks stones by the water that Peper finds almost comical. To him, the repetitive activity becomes a metaphor for boredom: the quiet absurdity of being so absorbed in one object of desire that there is little room left for anything else.
And then, eventually, boredom does what boredom sometimes does best. It makes us look around.
Peper chose this slow rhythm deliberately. Desire, he explains, can erupt suddenly, taking over all rational thinking. By allowing the first part of the film to unfold at a more leisurely pace, he wanted the shift in the protagonist’s emotional world to feel all the more pronounced. We settle into his solitude before the possibility of something new interrupts it.
Visually, that sense of suspension is reinforced by the choice to shoot on 16mm. The images have a tactile quality that makes the summer feel less like a backdrop than a place we could almost inhabit: the light, the water, the quiet spaces between one moment and the next. For Peper, however, working with film is about more than texture. It changes the way a production moves, slowing down the team and making everyone more conscious of what happens in front of the lens. “There is a certain intentionality to working this way that I really value.” He also wanted the film to feel timeless, offering a brief escape from the speed of the digital era.
That slower, more deliberate approach makes the sudden appearance of the woman all the more striking. As the protagonist gazes towards the ocean and notices her swimming, his attention begins to drift away from the object he has trusted. Peper describes the moment as almost dreamlike, capturing how quickly desire can take hold and how difficult it can be to explain, let alone control. Cross-dissolves blur the boundaries between moments, mirroring the movement of his thoughts as one desire gives way to another.
There is no grand decision, no carefully reasoned conclusion. He simply notices someone. And for a moment, the world opens up again.
Perhaps that is what makes the film more than a playful story about an unlikely crush. The arrival of the woman doesn’t necessarily erase the meaning the object holds for him. One attachment can give way to another without making what came before any less real. Desire, in this sense, is less a destination than a way of moving through the world: sometimes predictable, sometimes ridiculous, and occasionally capable of surprising us when we least expect it.
When I asked Peper about the meaning objects acquire over time, he offered a particularly evocative image: “In a way, an object becomes a silent passenger on our journey through life, witnessing moments that give it meaning beyond its original purpose.” It’s a lovely way of putting it. The things we live with are there for the ordinary days, the breakups, the moves, the periods when nothing much happens. They stay while we change, gathering significance along the way.
And maybe that is why we sometimes find it so hard to let them go. Not because the object itself is irreplaceable, but because of everything we have quietly placed inside it.
Objects of Desire leaves us with a gently mischievous thought: perhaps we don’t always know what we’re looking for until something catches our eye. Sometimes it’s a TV stand. Sometimes it’s a stranger swimming in the sea. And sometimes, all it takes is looking up from the thing we thought we couldn’t live without.