The time to stop watching this movie is before you start
dir: Joanna Arnow
2024
Occasionally, a film comes along, and you think maybe you’ve accidentally seen a parody trailer for something so outlandish that it can’t be real. And then you watch it, and you find out that’s it’s not a parody, and it’s something of a horrifying shock. It slowly dawns on you that what you thought was a sketch taking the piss out of arthouse flicks is a full length film, and it’s a comedy that you’re meant to take seriously and laugh at. And that’s when the depression kicks in.
The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the second longest title for a movie that I think I’ve ever seen or reviewed, at least this year. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World beats it by one scant word. But while the latter Romanian film was nearly three hours long, and profoundly nuts, that was a breeze to enjoy compared to this 87 minute film that was agonising to get through. I hate watching videos of actual surgeries, and this film was like watching an 87 minute surgery video, except the patient / victim was / is me.
Excruciating doesn’t even get close to covering the cringing experience I had watching this. Maybe I’m lacking in sufficient maturity. Maybe I’m too squeamish when it comes to the depiction of ‘mature’ sexual relationships between practitioners of consensual BDSM. Maybe my expectation that scenes that start and end should have something happen in between to justify their presence in a film is unreasonable.
Maybe I’m just not on the filmmaker’s wavelength. It’s not that I don’t want to be; I really wish I understood where she was coming from. I’ve read a couple of interviews with her, and what she was going for, but the idea that this, as billed, is an actual comedy, utterly perplexes me.
Maybe if I watched this at an open air cinema on the top of a tenement building in Brooklyn with a bunch of film students or arts poseurs, I might have seen the level upon which this works. As it is, though, I watched it far from Brooklyn, alone, probably with an involuntary look of bemusement on my face.
The director plays the main character here too. That is her right. If she’s going to make a movie, she can cast herself as herself. From beginning to end she delivers almost all of her dialogue in a flat, emotionless monotone that Daria herself would have envied. She is also naked for much of the movie. She’s the only one naked throughout the movie. It’s an almost aggressive level of vulnerability.
Her own parents are in the movie, playing the main character's parents, presumably in their own home and doing whatever it is that her parents do. At one stage her dad picks up his guitar and starts playing Solidarity Forever, which is great, and always awesome to hear, but it has nothing to do with anything that comes before it or after it. And it also makes me wonder whether she fought the impulse to make her parents sit through this flick at its premiere, because, come on. I don’t have old Jewish parents, but I very much doubt they would ever have wanted to watch me do a fraction of whatever happens in this flick, and even that being said it’s not because of explicitness or the nudity.
Many if not most of the scenes are little more than disconnected vignettes, and few of them really justify their own existence, at least for me. Many feel like moments from the maker’s life, or scenes she’s imagined, and, yes, she suffered for her art and so now do we, but how do they hang together?
I have no doubt they mean far more to the creator. I do admit I’m a bit squeamish when it comes to depictions of ‘adult’ relationships onscreen, and I guess there’s part of the flick that acts as a grown-up demystification of what goes on, or can go on, in these kinds of relationships. I have friends and acquaintances that will, unprompted, go off at length about how great and fulfilling their BDSM lifestyles are.
That’s great, that’s all well and good, I just, honestly, I have no interest in any of that stuff, and I’ve never wanted to hear about it.
I have a particular loathing of that leather and whips and restraints stuff, but it’s not for me to criticise what other people consensually do in the privacy of their own hovels or in public or at sex clubs. That’s their business. And this flick isn’t even about that stuff, not really.
It’s about the kinds of master / sub scenarios where the power dynamics dictate dialogue and roleplay scenarios, which is all well and good, but 99 per cent of whatever is depicted here is how unnatural and inhuman it all seems. Anna (the name being a fig-leaf of a distinction between the character she plays here and herself) voluntarily signs up to meet ‘masters’ who’ll boss her around and get her to do whatever they want, and yet she seems so flatly unmoved by whatever happens.
Allen (Scott Cohen) is the guy she sees the most over the course of the film. He is much older, and seems almost completely uninterested in her existence beyond her being submissive on command. It is never clear to me, at the beginning, or up to the very last scene that persists through the credits, what we are meant to get from that beyond “this was a very unfulfilling relationship I had with a guy that went a long time, and I can’t really articulate why I kept going back, but then I didn’t really have anything better to do, and all the other younger guys I tried the same stuff with were even worse.”
That, I can understand, but even what I’ve written could be a complete reach, because nothing Anna says in the film or the director has said in interviews supports that interpretation at all.
The film is somewhat divided into chapters based on either Anna’s relationships or who she was seeing, in whatever capacity, at a particular time, but, honestly, it hardly matters. This was clearly filmed over a long period of time and cobbled together in a mysterious fashion, as less of a jigsaw puzzle and more of a random collage. Anna works at some corporate job which takes up some screen time. Some of the absurdities of the corporate environment are held up like curios, like “look at the weird shit some people put up with for a crust”, but it has none of the insight of a person that actually works those kinds of office jobs would have (few movies or shows really get it right).
A lot of what passes for ‘observational humour’ throughout the flick lands leaden on a soiled carpet. There’s a reoccurring bit about a particular packet of food that Anna’s likes to extract from its pack, pop in the microwave and then eat, and, what the fuck is going on there? Is the point that it comes out of the pack in a really gross manner, or that she likes vegetarian packaged / processed foods that don’t look or sound that different (as they land in the bowl) from dog food?
And none of it made me laugh, or even smile. There was probably one scene where maybe I chuckled, where some friends are helping her with her online dating profile, and they ask what they should put in the section about things she likes, and Anna says she likes really dense foods that sit in her stomach for many hours.
Um, okay. And under dislikes she wants them to insert that she doesn’t like it when people are too upset about what happened on 9/11.
Right. Okay. Oh and there’s a moment when she recoils from Allen when he says he’s a Zionist. But she sees him again later on. And on and on and on.
One of her other ‘masters’ has costumes for her to wear and things to do and say that are far more on the humiliation side of things, and that was almost beyond tolerance for me, however maybe her point here is that, well, you thought the nudity was a bit extreme before, there are worse things that nudity.
It’s not like I can argue that this is degrading stuff, because it’s instigated by the maker: She’s putting these costumes on, she’s doing these things, not for our amusement or her own, but maybe to show how silly it all is? At no time do I get to understand why any of this stuff is appealing to her, but maybe that’s better than pathologising those who enjoy these experiences.
One of the last chaps she connects with, being Chris (Babak Tafti), is probably the most “normal” meet cute rom com equivalent, and what would look, on paper, as the “preferable” relationship, the healthy one, the fulfilling one, but this isn’t a romantic flick – if anything it’s clearly an anti-romantic flick, desaturating all of these interactions with anything close to a romantic idea or feeling.
If she is saying something about disconnected people trying and failing (or succeeding) to connect through sex, relationships or BDSM, well, I am probably at something of a disadvantage, because I couldn’t see any of it and scenes I watched that didn’t inspire pain or cringe invariably left confusion in their wake instead.
And yet I feel like Joanna Arnow is probably a talented artist in some respects, and did something impressive here, and probably told the story she wanted to tell as best she could, which is in itself an achievement.
It’s just…fucking hell. I did not get much if any enjoyment out of watching this.
5 times the feeling that you should have switched off the telly earlier and disconnected everything is too late out of 10
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“I think people can like more than one kind of relationship.” - The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
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