Photo: Magnolia Pictures

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Joanna Arnow

Over the course of a decade, Joanna Arnow has crafted a slender but vivid oeuvre of uncommonly personal filmmaking. Before last year, she had directed exactly three films: the 56-minute mid-length documentary i hate myself 🙂 (2013), the 11-minute black-and-white narrative short Bad at Dancing (2015), and the 6-minute narrative short Laying Out (2019). Each featured herself front and center, delving largely into issues and anxieties surrounding sexuality, social and familial relationships, and codes of behavior in New York City, poking and prodding at the boundaries with a disarming, self-conscious awkwardness. The concluding scenes of i hate myself 🙂, which feature Arnow showing the film she had made to her parents and her then-boyfriend, form a gauntlet throw of self-reflexivity and devil-may-care attitude that each of her films since then has explored.

Arnow’s narrative feature debut The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, despite running just 87 minutes, is longer than her entire previous body of work combined, correlating to a pronounced leap in scale and ambition. For the first time, Arnow plays a character not named after herself: Ann, a New Yorker in her thirties mired in a bland corporate job and, at the start of the film, in a long-term casual BDSM relationship with Allen (Scott Cohen), an older and more affluent man. Eventually, she begins exploring arrangements with other men as sign-posted by the five chapters of hilariously unequal length, each named after one or more men that she meets. The most notable newcomer is the sweet and caring Chris (Babak Tafti), though the film ultimately makes no feints at decisive change.

To convey all of this, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (a title so fittingly melancholy yet ludicrously distended that typing it all out is its own pleasure) opts for an almost prismatic approach, drawing out Ann’s life of near-constant humiliation—desired in sexual encounters but dreaded in work and familial interactions—as a cyclical series of shards of time, often honed by Arnow herself down to a single isolated exchange that cuts away right before an anticipated punchline. The effect, to put it crudely, is almost a continual coitus interruptus, and indeed while the film does not shy away from the consensual harshness and even absurdity of the dominant/submissive arrangements that Ann enters into—she’s almost always fully nude when she’s with Allen, and dons a “fuckpig” costume when with Elliot (Parish Bradley)—she’s rarely (if ever) seen experiencing genuine sexual pleasure. The performativity, the satisfaction of a job well-done seems to be its own fulfillment.

While The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed does contain plenty of mortifying humor in line with Arnow’s past work, the range afforded by a much longer runtime expands the opportunities for perpetual, low-key embarrassment. Where shorts like “Bad at Dancing” and “Laying Out” were hermetic in their focus on just two or three characters, and i hate myself 🙂 was entirely consumed by a few relationships, this new film is free to let its focus drift. Ann/Arnow is always retained as a center, but the comedy is allowed to drift out from her environs to a much greater degree than before: hackneyed business mantras a decade behind the times, the travails of dating apps, even an eerily prescient conversation about Zionism are evoked with ease. Each little scene has the capacity to suddenly evolve and take on a different intention, and the collision between the areas of Ann’s life without letting them overlap produces a synthesis towards understanding her desires and frustrations.

It’s well worth noting that Arnow, with this film especially, is operating within a very particular New York cineaste milieu. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is co-produced by Graham Swon, the independent maven involved with such vital works as Dan Sallitt’s Fourteen, Ted Fendt’s Classical Period, and Matías Piñeiro’s Hermia & Helena; it’s shot in cool, no-fuss digital by Barton Cortright, who also lensed Swon’s The World Is Full of Secrets and Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral; and it features a bevy of familiar faces in its cast and extras: Keith Poulson, Bingham Bryant, C. Mason Wells, Maddie Whittle, and Charles Bramesco among countless others.

Ann is seen carrying a Film at Lincoln Center tote in several scenes, and a few very curious film artifacts crop up throughout. At one point, she mentions that her favorite song is the theme to the fictitious film In the Act of Wishing for Love, and the track that plays (by composer Robinson Senpauroca) is a clear parody of In the Mood for Love‘s use of “Yumeji’s Theme”; this scene is later counter-balanced by a truly odd moment where she sings a song that can only be described as Les Misérables starring Sirius Black. Additionally, there is a rather intriguing mention in the credits for Andrei Ujică’s cosmonaut documentary Out of the Present (whose use I sadly was unable to spot), and the prominent use of two films-within-films with a special “experimental film cinematographer” credit for Charlotte Hornsby. Those both come on dates with Chris: the first a split-screen landscape film focused on waves (which may takes place at Anthology Film Archives) and the second a digital black-and-white French musical featuring a female singer and a male guitarist. Of all things, the man’s countenance and the welcome low-budget stiltedness suggested to me Pierre Léon’s L’Idiot (2008), another film with brilliant use of limited means and space.

All of this is very funny, and contributes to a melting pot of interests that can be further extrapolated to influences (Pialat of course comes to mind). But The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is Arnow’s through and through, down to the casting of her own parents (something of a feat considering how upset they were at the end of i hate myself 🙂). Her long-shot frames, frequently at oblique angles, provide an ideal vantage point to observe a life slightly askew, and for all of its humor and self-conscious silliness, the aggregate is something more pensive. In the penultimate scene, Arnow’s father apologizes for overcooking the fish, ruefully commenting on how much there is of it. Both a (unconscious or not) riposte to Woody Allen’s opening Annie Hall monologue and a complete summation of her work thus far, Arnow’s choice is to keep going nevertheless, burrowing ever further into the strangeness of modern life.

Photo: Sideshow/Janus Films

The Beast/La Bête

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Bertrand Bonello

In the past five years or so, at least two of the greatest films have also provided their own radical versions of adaptation. Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018) left the events of Anna Seghers’s novel mostly intact, but augmented its concerns through both image and word, deliberately obfuscating the time period in which the film is set and adding a discordant narration that reflects back on the nature of storytelling in times of immense crisis. Even more boldly, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Drive My Car (2021) drastically expanded Murakami Haruki’s short story, using disparate elements not only from the author’s body of work but also Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya to create an all-encompassing meditation on artistic creation and the strife and potential healing within relationships. 2023 also saw a surfeit of unconventional adaptations, with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, and Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things all zeroing in on one aspect of their sources or shifting their focal points, all to fascinating if not entirely successful ends.

But the greatest adaptation to premiere last year came from an unlikely source: Bertrand Bonello. Despite his palpable interest in inspirations both historical—Saint Laurent, Zombi Child—and mythical—Tiresia—his latest magnum opus, The Beast, is his first work of explicit adaptation, with the screenplay credited to himself in collaboration with Benjamin Charbit and Guillaume Bréaud, “freely inspired” by Henry James’s legendary 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. “Freely” is even perhaps pushing it: it is almost an impudent work of adaptation, spooling out James’s story of devastating melancholy between an Englishman anticipating a sudden catastrophic event and the woman who agrees to keep watch with him into a tripartite tale of thwarted connection across the ages. In 1910 Paris, on the eve of the Great Flood, concert pianist Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Englishman Louis (George MacKay) reconnect over her premonition; in 2014 Los Angeles, aspiring actress Gabrielle is stalked by Louis, now an American incel; and in 2044 Paris, Gabrielle meets Louis while deciding whether to undergo an AI-recommended procedure to “cleanse” her DNA by reliving her past lives to purge her emotions.

Making the appearance of The Beast all the stranger is the existence another 2023 adaptation: Patric Chiha’s The Beast in the Jungle is a putatively more faithful reworking of James, retaining the original story’s names and tracking their interactions over the course of 25 years (beginning in 1979) in a Parisian nightclub. The differences are instructive, despite both directors’ entrancing focus on mood and texture. Chiha sticks close (but not entirely) to the letter of the novella: the outlines are the same, especially with the climactic scenes, and yet the tangents open up the hermetically sealed emotions of James’s characters. Numerous signposts are given, most of all the specter of AIDS which devastates the openly queer nightclub’s population, and the seemingly virginal James protagonists are swapped in for people with relationships of varying levels of success and intimacy.

For his part, Bonello plays with such expectations of fidelity from his first image: Seydoux in a green-screen studio (in what the viewer will later learn is her 2014 guise), taking off-screen directions from Bonello himself, as she performs actions of a woman in trouble, before her image and screen bleeds into a digitally artifacted blur that serves as the title card. The film then moves into the 1910 section, which recreates the first chapter of James’s novella to a T; immediately afterwards, the 2044 thread is introduced, and little after that is directly retained from James. The 1910 and 2014 sections play out over their respective halves of the film (only one shot from 2014 is intermingled with its predecessor), with the 2044 setting interspersed at unexpected intervals, a decision which, rather than deemphasizing futuristic speculation in favor of twinned tragic tales, explicitly casts the future as an inherently ethereal, inexplicable realm woven into our collective past and present, all the more vivid for its eerily quiet Paris, empty of cars and computer screens but always full of a certain menace.

Bonello’s never been shy about divulging his influences, and it’s easy to further extrapolate potential precedents for The Beast. There is of course Brian De Palma, whose self-casting in The Black Dahlia as a sleazy Hollywood director mirrors Bonello’s voice in the prologue. Of all people, Jia Zhangke seems to have made an impression with his two recent tripartite films, both of which bear a resemblance: Mountains May Depart with its past/present/near-future set-up (though the use of 4:3 is applied here to the future), and Ash Is Purest White in the use of past time periods to in effect revisit past works, with 1910 corresponding somewhat closely to House of Tolerance and 2014 to Nocturama. But while that latter film was equally indebted to Dawn of the Dead and Alan Clarke’s Elephant, and parts of Zombi Child are in conversation with I Walked With a Zombie, The Beast shares its clearest touchstone with its predecessor—filmed during a year-long delay in production—Coma: David Lynch. Paradoxically, the eighty-minute Coma feels closer to Inland Empire‘s complete dislocation, while the two-hour-and-forty-minute The Beast shares its own DNA primarily with Mulholland Dr., embracing the seductive Hollywood textures even as darkness rapidly approaches; even considering changing cultural preferences, Seydoux’s noticeably shorter hairstyle here compared to the other two sections suggests a kinship with Naomi Watts in Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece, as does her status as a woman staying in a residence not her own while trying to break into the industry. The extremely prominent use of Roy Orbison’s “Evergreen” only drives home the connection.

Bonello’s process for adaptation, like his proclivity towards inspiration, seems to be one of unique, discerning absorption, open to pulling from the unlikeliest of sources and repurposing them for his own uses. The boldest of these, of course, is the mass shooter Elliot Rodger, who killed six people at the University of California, Santa Barbara 2014 in a misogynist rage. Bonello intersperses recreations of several of his manifesto videos featuring Louis throughout Gabrielle’s 2014 narrative, and his fascination with the clear means of address that lay bare hatred and insecurity turns the first section’s tentative, repressed duet into a series of indecisive point/iron-willed counterpoint. In turn, the pronounced inequality in the span of years between the three time periods suggests a fracture in connections exacerbated by the events of this middle section, an acceleration towards oblivion.

There is too much contained in The Beast to even begin to encapsulate. For one, it’s still difficult to watch this film and MacKay’s brilliant, watchful performance without picturing how Gaspard Ulliel, a longtime Bonello collaborator originally cast in the part before the production delay and his untimely death in a skiing accident, would have played the part; on the other hand, the shifting identity and personality of Louis in relation to Gabrielle’s steady, tremulous presence is only enhanced by having a non-French actor assume these different forms. There’s also of course the sheer pleasure of watching Bonello shoot in Los Angeles (even catching a glimpse of a taco truck at one point), a mood consonant with yet distinct from his unrivaled work with Paris at night. Even the casting of three of the only significant characters besides the main duo bears mentioning: Guslagie Malanda from Saint Omer as an android in 2044; filmmaker and Red Scare podcaster Dasha Nekrasova as a model friend of Gabrielle in 2014; and producer Xavier Dolan as the voice of the AI guiding Gabrielle in 2044. These three oddly discordant choices, each seeming to represent entirely different strands of film culture, feel in line with Gabrielle’s computer in 2014 constantly contending with real-world events and online detritus that, taken together, form something genuinely unnerving: news coverage of the Ferguson uprising literally backgrounded, pop-up ads featuring a prescient description of a Trump presidency and promises of Kim Kardashian nudes, even some clips from Trash Humpers.

The general cacophony suggested by this hailstorm of information, however, does not truly describe the experience of The Beast, and how both Bonello and Seydoux contribute to the singular, overwhelming mood. Seydoux has been on one of the great acting runs of the twenty-first century, turning out what would conceivably be career-best work for anyone else in three consecutive years between France (2021), One Fine Morning (2022), and now this film; like in the former, so much power is derived from the shifting landscape that is Seydoux’s face, the terror, pleasure, and confusion that she vividly displays. Across the three parts united under Bonello’s implacable camera and alternately lush and cold surfaces, various motifs recur both within—most notably a nightclub in 2044 that is patterned at various times after the music and decor of 1972, 1980, and 1963—and across different parts: dolls (suggestively made out of celluloid in the 35mm-shot first part), shared musical pieces, psychics, and incongruously pigeons as a harbinger of death. What this all adds up to is something inexplicable, completely breaking from the letter of James but totally in line with the horrifyingly sad spirit: that when the final hammer blow comes, it will be in the most impossible of ways; that one life is not enough to contain the devastation that a single person will feel.