Joanna Arnow’s attention-grabbing debut “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” has been described as a sadomasochistic sex comedy, but it’s hard to laugh.
Arnow, who wrote, directed and stars in this sometimes-riveting, sometimes-dull study of demoralization, plays a dour 30-something New Yorker who spends her days getting pushed around by her boss (Armand Reiser). At night, she submits to the sexual commands of her various male masters, whom she meets online. The joke is that her days and nights aren’t that different.
And then the joke is on the audience when Arnow introduces us to six men in 30 minutes before we realize that we don’t yet know her character’s name. (It’s Ann.)
The film is structured by Ann’s partners, whose names appear in tidy white font on a black screen. They’re nearly always dressed; she’s almost always naked (though one partner, played by Parish Bradley, commands her to wear bunny ears and a pig nose). It’d be one thing if Ann enjoyed the sex. But from the snapshots we see, these encounters seem mostly humiliating and joyless. When obeying an order to touch herself in view of drivers on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, she just looks bored.
Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat. These glimpses of her character’s life could be stand-alone comic book panels. Together, they’re a mosaic of stagnation.
Arnow films her own nude body with the kind of frankness that is called brave because she wants to be more confrontational than arousing. She’s so visible that it takes a beat to remember that someone can be physically exposed and emotionally opaque.
Caught in our own disregard for Ann’s individuality, the audience has more in common with her masters, particularly Allen (Scott Cohen), an older divorced man whom Ann started seeing when she was 24. As a younger naïf, Ann might have hoped he might grow to like her. By now, callous Allen has simply taken root in her psyche and makes her feel, as she says in the first scene, “like I don’t even exist.”
What does a decade of disregard do to a person? Calling Allen the film’s villain gives the louse too much credit. He’s just a pattern, not the patternmaker. Allen can’t remember how many years Ann has been his bed partner; her company can’t remember how many years she’s been employed. (Her boss’s funniest bits come when he fatuously lectures about the importance of Facebook to a boardroom of millennials who gaze at him neutrally, powerless to interrupt.) When Arnow, who also edited the film, splices a scene of a lover scrawling a crude nickname on Ann’s belly next to a scene of the HR department coldly changing Ann’s job title, she’s made her basic point: neither cares about her needs.
Yet Arnow’s sophisticated point — the one referenced in the film’s unwieldy title — is what drives interest until our own spirits snap. Why won’t Ann allow herself to want more? Because she’s too stuck to embark upon a journey of empowerment and self-actualization. This isn’t “Eat, Pray, Love” — it’s strip, bend, repeat. And when she meets Chris (Babak Tafti), a genuinely nice man, his kindness seems to make her itchy.
Arnow’s visual style isn’t pretty, but it pairs well with the mood. She allows herself two flourishes: Once, she color-matches a guy’s beard to his beer; later, a blurry Ann exits a subway train and walks toward the lens until she comes into focus — a lovely metaphor for a woman struggling to see her own needs. Otherwise, Arnow and the cinematographer Barton Cortright lean into punishment, like the close-up of Ann squeezing out a chunky packet of microwave curry.
At the sound mix’s most unpleasant, we hear every swallow of Ann, of her distracted father (David Arnow) and of her exasperating mother (Barbara Weiserbs) at the dinner table. (Both are played by Arnow’s actual parents.)
Ultimately, the film reveals that everyone around Ann seems to be having more fun. Strangers’ muffled music and chatter are frequently heard through her walls. Ann knows happiness is out there. But to take off the pig nose and admit she wants it? That’s just too vulnerable.
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