I can think of few things more appropriate to call The Dress than absurd.
Most films follow characters.
Alex van Warmerdam's The Dress , like Tales of Manhattan and Twenty Bucks , accompanies an object as it changes hands. In this case, it's a dress. There's a mentally unbalanced man who stalks anyone wearing the dress, a woman who wants to excite her passionless painter lover, a meek young girl looking for a way to assert herself, and a businessman who finds himself on the outs after attacking his boss. The dress has an impact upon each of them. The dress seems to generate male sexual arousal, and, as a result, much of the film's outrageous comedy is sexually-oriented.