The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

(Joanna Arnow, USA, 2023)

Deadpan

At a specific moment of The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed – in truth, a moment that happens, with slight variations, many times over during the film – I gained a conscious insight into something that cinema can do that no other medium can even approximate. I wonder if it was even planned or foreseen as such by its talented maker, writer-director-editor Joanna Arnow, or rather discovered (as I discovered it as a spectator) in the palpable moment of cutting – passing from the end of one scene onto the start of the next.

The film is constructed on alternating streams of incident – Ann (Arnow) in her sadomasochistic sex life with successive male partners; at her soul-crushing office job; alone in her apartment; and with her Jewish family members. One of the early sexual scenes (around the 16-minute mark) involving Allen (Scott Cohen), a rather cold and insensitive, older ‘dominant’, builds to what will become a familiar impasse: her confession “I like being submissive to you specifically” seems to disappoint him, or upset his enforced code of S&M interactional behaviour. He sighs in exasperation as she looks away from his face in bed (they are embracing); there’s a note of growing tension here.

But then we cut to a very ordinary, even flat action: Ann exits the stairway onto a station platform, where she will eat a chocolate ice-cream while waiting 20 minutes (elided) for the next train. She smiles and then laughs, alone, for no evident cause-effect reason (she could be reacting or remembering or … ).

This scene transition is not flowing, accelerating, accumulating or intensifying, but the exact opposite: a break in speed or level that registers (usually unconsciously) as a diminuendo or, more exactly, a deflation. In this case, comic deflation. We gear down, from scene-end to scene-start, after an ultimately mistaken anticipation of rising ‘drama’ – again and again. But these incidents do not have consequences; they just go round and around in a cycle. Their order is, in some sense, arbitrary – as is indicated by the return of Allen (after several other partners have seemingly come and gone) in the final shot-tableau.

Among low-budget, independent American films of the early 2020s, The Feeling … registers among the best and most distinctive. It’s also highly enjoyable, in its own mordant, deadpan way. It’s constructed very much like one of Luc Moullet’s features, or Jean Eustache’s remarkable Mes petits amoureuses (1974 – which, Moullet, intriguingly, criticised for its chosen form): Arnow talks in interviews of gathering many short scenes, ‘blackouts’ in a sense, with no obligation to ‘flesh them out’ into conventionally full or complete dramaturgic units.

The rigorous systematicity of this procedure – which could have failed badly – takes the project beyond the mere quirkiness of Miranda July or the strained naturalism of the overrated Janet Planet (2023). It has more in common with the loose Graham Swon/Ricky D’Ambrose/Ted Fendt/Sofia Bohdanowicz school of American filmmaking today, laterally with Matías Piñeiro’s globe-trotting work, and thus with the spiritual father-figure of this trend, Dan Sallitt.

The effort to describe some of these quasi-blackout scenes in words would take longer than how the scene itself plays out on screen. In one example from dozens, an immortal office-life vignette proceeds from Ann entering a room where her colleague is already at work, to her slumping into a chair and starting to type. Him: “You missed the awards lunch. You got an award for being here for one year”. Her: “I’ve been here three-and-a-half years.” A third worker enters and hands her the prize. Close shot of the object, bearing the inscription: “ONE YEAR – We thank you for your loyalty”. Off-screen remark: “Congratulations”. End of scene. That took, in total, 40 seconds.

Aside (on which, seemingly, few reviewers have commented): Arnow’s string of film references structuring scenes is weirdly oblique, perhaps for evading-copyright reasons. In the Mood for Love (2000), for instance, becomes In the Act of Wishing for Love, and its familiar theme music is melodically tweaked in playback.

As in Moullet, the general flatness-effect is militantly maintained: simple, static shots (for the most part), drab and minimally dressed, everyday sets, no expressive lighting, no soundtrack score, a lot of ambient, environmental noise (such as street traffic) filling the frequent passages in which words fall into an abyss of silence.

Displays of exuberance – of any kind – thereby carry an excessive, indeed embarrassing air (an affect that is not easy to contrive). Apart from the extremes of Ann’s submission exercises (such as listlessly masturbating on the apartment building roof while dressed as a pig), a highlight of the film in this regard is her father’s enthusiastic rendition, with acoustic guitar, of “Solidarity Forever”. (Ann’s parents are Arnow’s own – in a fine tradition of directors who cast the non-professional actors from their family, including John Cassavetes, Julie Delpy, Azazel Jacobs, Amalia Ulman, Philippe Garrel … ) As a director, Arnow has clearly advanced a long way from the documentary portrait of her family life and intimate relationships in I Hate Myself :) (2013), the only other work by her that I’ve so far seen.

Ann is a fascinating character, although it would be quite wrong to say that she ‘goes’ anywhere in the course of the film – that she develops, matures or changes. No journey for this heroine! The film is commendably non-committal – blank, even – when it comes to ‘exploring’, in any thematic or (god forbid) moral-ethical way, the matter of consensual BDSM relationships; it’s presented as just the way some people are in a generally (but not traumatically) disconnected, alienated, unrewarding world.

© Adrian Martin 1 January 2025