In writer-director Joanna Arnow’s “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” Ann (Arnow), a 30-something New Yorker, lies naked in bed with an older man, Allen (Scott). Cohen), with whom she has had a years-long BDSM relationship. She tells him she’s grateful he only cares about his own pleasure.
“It’s like I don’t even exist,” she says.
Much is out of reach in Arnow’s slyly insightful and very funny new film. Love is certainly nowhere near Ann’s life, despite a series of romantic encounters. Music is talked about — from the songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber to the team’s cheering squad in “A League of Their Own” — but rarely heard. In a scene during a tryst 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 materialize in this unflinchingly sardonic portrait of millennial malaise. Her life unfolds in a series of brief, crisply edited vignettes that bounce between her humdrum professional life and her extreme but equally humdrum sex life.
Obedience is forced upon her in both places, as are labels, many of which Ann accepts silently but not necessarily apathetically. A partner (Parish Bradley) who instructs her to communicate in “a series of oinks” writes the lewd name he gave her on her belly in marker. At work, an invisible HR man gives her a new title: “Clinical Media E-learning Specialist.” What’s worse is hard to say. After three years in the role, she received a one-year anniversary trophy.
How Ann feels about all this isn’t always obvious, possibly even to her. Arnow portrays her as much as she directs and edits the film, with a detached expression. Sometimes Ann backs down. She tells her older lover that she is not an Internet window that he can open and close. But there’s also something about Ann that recoils from more sentimental encounters. Later in the film, she starts dating someone sweet if naively romantic (Babak Tafti) who isn’t familiar with the kind of bondage roleplaying that Ann is used to. But her sweetness is yet another strike against him. Ann may be a victim of her modern, alienating environment, but she is also a product of it.
Arnow, who also made the 2013 film “I Hate Myself :),” has often been compared to Lena Dunham as a voice that represents a generation, for her willingness to bear everything on screen and her penchant for autobiography. (Ann’s parents in the film are played by Arnow’s real-life mother and father, Barbara Weiserbs and David Arnow.)
But Arnow’s sensibility is much drier and more satirical. Whether Ann can free herself from her circumstances is one thing, but Arnow, as a shrewd filmmaker, proves repeatedly that she can. How else can you explain the incisive absurdity of the poem-like dialogue that permeates the film? A sexual partner whose first sentence is, “Thank you for forgiving me for complaining about LA.” A boss who announces, “If you’re not on Spotify, you’re late.” And Ann, who after humiliating 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 for Doing Something Has Passed,” a Magnolia Pictures release, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association but contains nudity and adult language. Running time: 87 minutes. Three stars out of four.
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