In The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, writer-director-star Joanna Arnow plays Ann, a thirtysomething woman in a long-term BDSM relationship with the much older Allen (Scott Cohen). The film opens on a naked Ann lying in bed beside a clothed Allen, before she turns and robotically dry humps him while he feigns sleep. “I love how you don’t care if I get off,” Ann coos to him. “It’s like I don’t even exist.” While this moment immediately establishing the playful rules of Ann and Allen’s sexual agreement, Arnow also hits on an apt metaphor for the existential crisis of so many modern millennials: that they’re exposed and ignored in an unforgiving social climate still dominated by older generations.
Ann’s affair with Allen is indicative of the rest of her day-to-day existence. As a “Clinical eMedia Learning Specialist” at a banal New York corporate office, she’s regularly condescended to and overlooked by her milquetoast superiors. (At one point, Ann is awarded a chintzy one-year anniversary trophy even though she’s been at her job for over three years.) Meanwhile, her parents (played by Arnow’s real-life mother and father, Barbara Weiserbs and David Arnow) are simultaneously overbearing and disinterested around her.
These interactions play out in a comically impassive fashion that’s familiar from the Amerindie playbook. In her first feature, Arnow, who speaks in an unwavering deadpan tone throughout, crafts a style that could be described as equal parts Girls and Napoleon Dynamite.
Arnow’s dry sense of humor is particularly apparent in the scenes between Ann and Allen, piercing the provocative mystique of a BDSM relationship by displaying their sexual exploits in an exceedingly monotonous way. While risking mockery of the fetish community, it’s hard to deny the hilarity of Ann being ordered to run back and forth from the bed to the bedroom wall while Allen furiously jerks off. Arnow also escalates Allen’s typical boomer indifference toward Ann’s life throughout, especially in a running joke where he’s unable to remember where Ann went to college, even though it’s the one non-role-playing question that he repeatedly asks her.
Despite her generally apathetic disposition, Ann eventually begins to tire of the lack of reciprocation in her relationship with Allen. Subsequently, the second half of the film covers her attempts at branching out into the contemporary dating scene, which initially results in some unsatisfactory dates with other kink-enthusiast partners closer in age. The funniest of these involves Elliot (Parish Bradley), whose methods as a dom consist of dressing Ann up in a bondage “FuckPig” outfit and hurling deliberately misogynistic rhetoric (“What would your friends at the Women’s March say about this?” he taunts her during one-such tryst).
Just as the film’s unrelenting tone of detached irony is becoming somewhat wearying, Ann meets Chris (Babak Tafti) and, all of a sudden, some genuine warmth begins to creep into the proceedings. Chris is unlike Ann’s other would-be suitors, in that he’s not well-versed in BDSM. Yet he also has a quietly reserved nature that Ann responds to.
Cut to a few endearing dates and awkward attempts to introduce Chris to Ann’s particular sexual kinks and a charming millennial romance is in full bloom. Arnow traverses some conventional rom-com terrain in this stretch, but she and Tafti share an earnest rapport that makes Ann’s gradual realization of her own self-worth ring authentic.
It’s hard to say exactly what Arnow’s view of BDSM play is through all of this, with The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed seeming to suggest that Ann’s predilection for it is a signifier of her stunted emotional state. By finding a quote-unquote “regular” partner, Ann is able to finally push back against the film’s titular sentiment and take charge of her life. And with the film sticking to such a rigorously aloof aesthetic, Ann and Allen aren’t necessarily given the room to breathe as characters in order to fully parse through these complicated issues, which ultimately leads to a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion. Nevertheless, Arnow deserves credit for embodying the alienating angst of millennial life in all its nakedly neurotic glory.
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