Acerbic and bleakly funny, Joanna Arnow’s feature debut is as intentionally awkward and opaque as its mouthful of a title: The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. At once overstated in its dialogue and restrained in its visual style, it follows a thirty-something Brooklyn woman through a series of sexual encounters and situationships, as she tries to find what satisfies her — in bed, and in life.

The film’s withholding nature makes for a perfect handshake with its glum protagonist — played by Arnow herself — whose disconnect from the world around her motivates amusing aesthetic turns. Tonally, it’s a work that consistently simmers on a medium flame, underscored by a purposeful sense of millennial dissatisfaction.

It’s also incredibly frank with its depictions of kink and sexuality. It presents physical intimacy as an act so casual — even unremarkable — that its sex scenes and plentiful, full-frontal nudity harbor not even an ounce of trepidation or shame. The result is a relaxing, remarkably self-assured film about uncertainty.

Credit: Magnolia Pictures

What is The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed about?

The film opens with Ann (Arnow), a mostly quiet and assuming woman, lying naked in bed with Allen (Scott Cohen), an older man she’s been involved with for a decade. Despite the longevity of their affair, she hasn’t found the right sexual rhythm with him, or a rhythm of any sort. Their conversations are brief and blunt, and while their sexual escapades involve experimental powerplay and complicated instructions, nothing he does seems to work for her.

Ann has a vague idea of what she wants — to be dominated with passion — but specificity, and being brought to orgasm by a sexual partner, always seem to elude her. This lack of spark and excitement bleeds into her everyday interactions, whether with her coworkers at her mundane office job, or her overbearing Jewish family, with whom she doesn’t really click. She doesn’t talk as much as they do, nor does she seem to really listen (a flaw of which she subtly accuses Allen without recognizing it in herself).

Across the film’s 87 minutes — divided into 5 chapters, whose names become a running gag — she begins seeing numerous different partners in an effort to find a new “master,” each more neurotic than the last, until she finds a man with whom she’s comfortable. Along the way, she becomes a willing participant in various humiliation rituals, sexual encounters the movie mirrors with her attempts to reconnect with her much more outgoing and well-adjusted older sister. In either case, something’s missing, and until she finds what that is, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed takes on a languid appearance, with filmmaking and comic timing that verge on the absurd.

Credit: Magnolia Pictures

Joanna Arnow’s filmmaking is precise and absurd

Nearly the entire movie is filmed at a distance, using carefully crafted long and medium shots that capture Ann’s movement within space. The camera almost never moves, allowing life — in all its idiosyncratic hues — to play out uninterrupted.

Arnow, who also wrote and edited the film, proves herself a singular voice with the way she crafts each scene: purposefully and unconventionally. Whether a mechanical sex scene, or an equally humdrum conversation, she drops the audience in the middle of ongoing physical, verbal and emotional transitions, and cuts away as soon the central point of a scene — its emotional essence — has come to the fore.

This gives the film a feeling of weightlessness despite its gloomy tone, as though it were a stone casually skipping across a pond. Few debut features have been this downright easy to watch, welcoming viewers with open arms into Arnow’s world of sexual self-discovery, in which she spends nearly every scene completely naked.

There isn’t a wide range of emotional or aesthetic contrast from start to finish, though that’s sort of the point. However, when Ann’s rut becomes more intense and inescapable, the film too begins to feel like a ticking clock, going back and forth between sex scenes, work conversations, and uneventful family dinners faster and faster, as though they were fleeting obligations.

But when Ann finally meets Chris (Babak Tafti), a sweet man who doesn’t quite share the same sexual interests, but is much more interested in her as a person, the film finally switches gears, albeit ever so slightly. It seems to gain its missing spark in the form of establishing shots of the bustling city, the occasional close-up, and dialogue that sounds at least partially (if not fully) engaged, rather than the monotone delivery that has defined each interaction thus far.

It’s hardly the kind of movie where time stands still, or where its quiet absurdism gives way to some euphoric formal sweep. But there’s a noticeable enough injection of energy, when Ann and Chris connect, that it introduces the possibility of some phantom happiness — not necessarily within immediate reach, but somewhere on the horizon.

A major reason this transition works, however, is the film’s performances, which Arnow both leads and directs with clear-cut vision akin to Greek Weird Wave virtuosos like Christos Nikou and Yorgos Lanthimos.

Credit: Magnolia Pictures

Joanna Arnow delivers a fine-tuned, vulnerable performance

As Ann, Arnow turns inward, playing each emotion close to her naked chest, and burying it under the kind of uncertainty that has festered so long that it’s become an unremarkable equilibrium. Though she didn’t originally write the role for herself, it’s hard to imagine anyone else embodying it so completely, with a sense of complete physical comfort in front of the camera, and a commitment to the kind of laconic line delivery that runs the risk of feeling robotic.

The film’s performances, across the board, often ride all the way up to that line, with awkward spoken dialogue that lack contractions or colloquialisms, but are imbued with sharp intention. The silent gaps between each line result in scenes feeling as though they’ve been sapped of all urgency and passion, leaving behind a depressed husk of a woman who drifts between work and home and family, in search of some missing part of herself.

When she finally seems to find this missing piece, Arnow’s performance (along with Tafti’s) is ever-so-subtly modulated in tone. Ann and Chris, unlike so many other characters in the film, feel engaged — with each other, and with their surroundings — and fill the silences not with animus, but with a subtle sense of comfort and contentment. It’s a wry film about little victories, told through a brusque tale of sexual experimentation, and finding oneself incrementally through the fog of daily existence.

How to watch: The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is in theatres from April 26.

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