The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow, 2023) (Patreon)

Like many of you, I've been hearing about Joanna Arnow for a while now. In cinephile circles, her films I Hate Myself :) and Bad at Dancing have gotten an unusual amount of attention for narrative shorts. As you may know, the formidable Dan Sallitt is a fan, and he's a tough customer, not exactly Mikey the Life Cereal Kid tough, but highly discriminating to be sure. I haven't seen the short films, but based on her feature debut, all I can say is, believe the hype. While it's often the case that young filmmakers display their influences without transforming them into anything particularly original, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is a bit of a marvel. We understand Arnow's cinematic syntax -- Roy Andersson and Hal Hartley loom large here -- but she applies it in a wholly unique way.

Ann (Arnow) is in her late 30s, works an unsatisfying, unspecified tech job, and has been the submissive in a decade-long relationship with Allen (Scott Cohen). First of all, the sexual frankness of The Feeling would be notable at almost any time in film history, but in our present moment, it's revelatory, and highlights the degree to which adult sexuality has been purged from contemporary movies. But what makes The Feeling so bracing is the fact that Ann's sexual desire is a kind of parallel performance of her sense of hopelessness and inadequacy elsewhere in her life. As we watch Ann hump Allen's leg while he presents to be asleep, she says "I love how you don't even care if I get off." After a few minutes, Allen rolls over and asks, "could you not?"

In other words, Ann participates in a relationship with an emotionally withholding older man, but enfolds his disinterest and unavailability into her kink. And while Ann's sexual interactions with others show that she really does like being a sub, Arnow never lets the viewer know for sure whether Ann has actively pursued a sex life that caters to her kinks, or if she has in fact turned settling into a kind of perverse pleasure. There are moments when Ann clearly wants more from Allen, and while he does seem to care about her, he is often dismissive. Arnow puts quotation marks around his insensitivity, so we never know whether he is asshole or is playing an asshole.

With its precise blocking, deadpan performances, and above all its striking editing patterns, The Feeling uses formalism both to drain the drama from almost every situation (Ann's fuck sessions are no more, or no less, erotic than her staff meetings at work), and to propel the film by analogy. Composed in short, one-shot scenes, the first third of Arnow's film jumps between Ann's hook-ups, her soulless corporate work environment, and her passive-aggressive interactions with her family, especially her mother (Barbara Weiserbs). Arnow is too skillful to construct blatant rhymes or metaphors, but seeing Ann exist in these various scenarios allows us to form analogies of affect, understanding who Ann is and why she may be standing in the way of her own happiness.

The second half of the film mostly involves Ann's new love interest Chris (Babak Tafti). She meets him on a dating site and soon they are going to dinner, heading to an Anthology-like space to watch a Sharon Lockhart-like experimental film, and watching TV together at his place. But what's really happening here is that Ann is trying to reconcile her desires with her habits. Chris is obviously very into Ann, and he is thoughtful, funny, and even a bit earnest. While a much dumber film would have Ann reject Chris out of hand, since the "damaged woman" always rejects the "nice guy," The Feeling shows us Ann working with Chris to recalibrate her sense of reality. 

When Ann talks with Chris about being a sub, he first offers for her to keep seeing doms on the side while dating him. But then, we see the two of them work out the dom/sub dimension of their sex, as a deliberate erotic performance they are both working out in real time. But most importantly, this sex play clearly has the potential to be woven into the fabric of a loving, consensual relationship, one where both partners are valued and in which Ann recognizes what it is to be genuinely liked. Arnow's adroit filmmaking, meanwhile, becomes more fluid and less compartmentalized, mirroring Ann's evolution into an integrated self. The last scene, however, offers a note of eerie ambiguity. It's unclear whether it's a flashback, a flash-forward, or even just an outtake, and any meaning we ascribe to it pretty much recodes the entire film. Despite the protestations implied in its title, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is right on time.