“The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” Is a Deceptively Plain Masterpiece

A decade ago, thinking about a pair of independent films more than a generation apart—Claudia Weill’s “Girlfriends” (1978) and Alex Ross Perry’s “The Color Wheel” (2011)— I was struck by how much their delicate blends of comedy and drama owed to the directors’ senses of distance, their discerning choices about how far from the actors to place the camera. The Brooklyn-based filmmaker Joanna Arnow displays a similar art of distance in her first dramatic feature, “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” but to exquisitely and agonizingly different effect. (The movie, one of the outstanding offerings of last year’s New York Film Festival, is being released this Friday.) Arnow, who wrote and directed the movie, also stars in it as Ann, a thirty-something Brooklynite whose private life is centered on a submissive sexual relationship with a somewhat older man named Allen (Scott Cohen). It’s an unabashedly sexual movie, and its most provocative episodes are acted out by Arnow herself. Yet the precision with which she places herself in the frame, her careful calibration of the relationship of image to performer, enables her to sublimate Ann’s conflicts and vulnerability into a sort of spiritual exaltation. Ann’s desire to be dominated appears to be less about the physical effect of pain or bondage than it is about humiliation. In the first scene, she’s naked in bed, lying on top of a blanket under which Allen is sleeping, and rubbing herself against his inert body as she expresses appreciation for the way he ignores her pleasure. It turns out that Allen is awake, but just ignoring her. She says, “I like how you don’t care if I get off, because it’s like I don’t even exist,” and he responds, “Can you not?” In short order, the movie runs through a gamut of humiliations and abnegations that Ann endures in other aspects of her life. In her relationship with her parents—played by Arnow’s actual parents, Barbara Weiserbs and David Arnow—Ann faces a minefield of passive and active verbal aggressions that stifle her good intentions and attribute bad ones to her. […]

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