By Jake Coyle | Associated Press
In writer-director and star Joanna Arnow’s “The Feeling That the Time to Do Something Has Passed,” Ann (Arnow), a New Yorker in her thirties, lies naked in bed with a man older, Allen (Scott Cohen), with whom she has a BDSM relationship for several years. She tells him that she is grateful that he only cares about his own pleasure.
“It’s like I don’t even exist,” she says.
A lot of things are just out of reach in Arnow’s insightful and very funny new film. Love, of course, is far from being Ann’s life despite a series of romantic encounters. We talk about music – from Andrew Lloyd Webber shows to cheers for the cast of “A League of Their Own” – but we rarely hear it. In a scene during a date with a composer, Ann says her favorite soundtrack is “In the Act of Wishing for Love”, but she means “In the Mood for Love”.
Even Ann’s existential crisis doesn’t really materialize in this decidedly sardonic portrait of millennial malaise. His life unfolds in a series of brief, crisp vignettes that oscillate between his dull professional life and his extreme but equally dull sex life.
Obedience is imposed on her in both places, as are labels, which Ann mostly accepts quietly, but not necessarily apathetically. A partner (Parish Bradley) who asks her to communicate through “a series of oinks” writes the obscene name he gave her on her stomach in marker. At work, an invisible HR gives him a new job title: “Clinical Media E-Learning Specialist.” It’s hard to say which is worse. After three years of work, she received a birthday trophy.
How Ann feels about all this isn’t always obvious, perhaps even to her. Arnow describes her extensively as she directs and edits the film, with a detached deadpan. Sometimes Ann pushes back. She tells her older lover that she is not an Internet window that he can open and close. But there is also something about Ann that is averse to more sentimental encounters. Later in the film, she begins dating someone nice but naively romantic (Babak Tafti) who is unfamiliar with the kind of bondage role-play Ann is accustomed to. But his gentleness is rather an attack on him. Ann may be a victim of her modern and alienating environment, but she is also a product of it.
Arnow, who also directed the 2013 film “I Hate Myself :),” has often been compared to Lena Dunham as the representative voice of a generation, for her willingness to endure anything on screen and for her propensity to autobiography. (Ann’s parents in the film are played by Arnow’s real mother and father, Barbara Weiserbs and David Arnow.)
But Arnow’s sensibility is much drier and satirical. That Ann could break free from her circumstances is one thing, but Arnow, as a supremely insightful filmmaker, proves again and again that she did. How else can you explain the cutting absurdity of the poem-like dialogues that run throughout the film? A sexual partner whose first line is, “Thank you for forgiving me for denying Los Angeles.” A boss who announces: “If you’re not on Spotify, you’re behind.” » And Ann, who after having humiliated herself with her older lover, says: “The candles were beautiful”, only for him to respond: “There was only one candle. »
“The feeling that the time to do something is over”
3 stars out of 4
Unclassifiedbut contains nudity and adult language
Operating time: 87 minutes
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