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.