‘The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Joanna Arnow. USA. 2023. 87mins.  

The do’s, don’t’s and don’t-even-go-there’s of contemporary dating have long been standard fodder for US indie cinema, but they rarely get dissected quite so tartly, or with such weirdly impassive wit, as in The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed, the debut feature by promising new multi-hyphenate Joanna Arnow. Executive produced by Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Red Rocket), this more than acidic and very adult comedy of sexual and emotional manners is written, directed and edited by Arnow (winner of a Berlin Silver Bear for her 2015 short Bad at Dancing) and features her in the lead, giving a performance that takes the term ‘vanity-free’ to audacious lengths. 

Marks Joanna Arnow out as a talent unafraid to go the full nine yards

Too sharply cynical to appeal to a merely wry hipster crowd, The Feeling… has a satirical finesse and – despite initial appearances – even a kind of warmth that will guarantee it exposure at festivals and commercially, and mark Arnow out as a talent unafraid to go the full nine yards. She plays a 30-ish woman named Ann, living in New York and doing a drab, screen-based corporate job of some sort. Her love life – mapped out in five chapters, named after her various male partners – seems busy enough, but singularly joyless. For nine years, she has been in a BDSM relationship with an older man, Allen (Scott Cohen), who seems altogether uninterested in her pleasure.

In the opening scene, Ann – stark naked, as she is in several scenes – dry humps Allen while he’s half asleep, rebuking him for his selfishness and misogyny. But perhaps that’s part of the slave-master role-playing she seems addicted to, maybe as a result of her long experience with him. Later liaisons include much glum online dating, such as an encounter with a man who gets her to dress up in a pig costume: just one of the submissions that Ann seems comfortable with, although the viewer may well feel increasingly uneasy on her behalf.

In between these episodes come assorted vignettes from Ann’s life; edited by Arnow herself, some incidents feel like blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em non sequiturs. They often involve her embarrassment or humiliation in various situations (a co-worker tells her that the salt lamp she loves so much is “a thing for lonely people”), and many involve her over-protective, over-bearing, somehow not quite properly affectionate parents, an elderly pair of Jewish veteran lefties. There’s more than a touch of Seinfeld’s Costanza family in these scenes, while overall Arnow’s particular take on the comedy of disappointment has more than a flavour of Todd Solondz.

Eventually, Ann may have found herself a nice guy – Chris (Babk Tafti) – with whom to share cuddles and experimental movies, and shock with her love of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals (in one priceless scene, Arnow creates her own awful Harry Potter themed ballad). But perhaps old sexual/emotional habits die hard, as per Arnow’s deliciously acerbic end-credits punchline.

Crisply acted all round, with telegraph economy making for the maximum cringe factor, the film very much rides on Arnow’s old no-holds-barred performance as a bespectacled, ever-unimpressed Ann. She comes across somewhat like a grown-up version of Enid Coleslaw, the girl from Ghost World; the Daniel Clowes graphic novel filmed by Terry Zwigoff. The film’s sexual politics content is all the more outrageous because of Ann’s manner – a slouchy, whiny, not-even-ironic deadpan.

Shot by Barton Cortright in a series of highly composed mini-tableaux, with a strange, glazed-frosted look to the texture, the film has the feel of a bad dream but a painfully comic one, although this is often the kind of comedy that makes you quietly gulp in disbelief rather than chortle.