Assessment: ‘The Feeling That the Time for Doing One thing Has Handed’ pronounces an thrilling new voice

In writer-director-star Joanna Arnow’s “The Feeling That the Time for Doing One thing Has Handed,” Ann (Arnow), a 30-something New Yorker, lies bare in mattress with an older man, Allen (Scott Cohen), with whom she has a yearslong BDSM relationship. She tells him she’s grateful he solely cares about his personal pleasure.
“It’s like I don’t even exist,” she says.
A lot is simply out of attain in Arnow’s shrewdly perceptive and really humorous new movie. Love, actually, is nowhere close to Ann’s life regardless of a sequence of romantic encounters. Music is talked about — from Andrew Lloyd Webber showtunes to the workforce cheer from “A League of Their Personal” — however seldom heard. In a single scene throughout a tryst with a composer, Ann says her favourite soundtrack is “Within the Act of Wishing for Love,” however she means “Within the Temper for Love.”
Even Ann’s existential disaster doesn’t fairly materialize on this unwaveringly sardonic portrait of millennial malaise. Her life performs out in a sequence of temporary, crispy edited vignettes that soar between her drab work life and her excessive however equally drab intercourse life.
Obedience is pushed on her in each locations, as are labels, most of which Ann quietly however not essentially apathetically accepts. One companion (Parish Bradley) who instructs her to speak in “a sequence of oinks” writes the lewd title he’s given her throughout her stomach in marker. At work, an unseen HR offers her a brand new job title: “Medical Media E-learning Specialist.” Which is worse is tough to say. After three years on the job, she’s given a one-year anniversary trophy.
How Ann feels about all of this isn’t at all times apparent, presumably even to her. Arnow portrays her a lot as she directs and edits the movie, with a indifferent deadpan. Generally Ann pushes again. She tells her older lover that she’s not an Web window he can open and shut. However there’s additionally one thing in Ann that recoils in opposition to extra sentimental encounters. Later within the movie, she begins courting somebody sweetly if naively romantic (Babak Tafti) who’s unfamiliar with the type of bondage role-playing Ann is accustomed to. However his sweetness is extra of a strike in opposition to him. Ann could also be a sufferer of her fashionable, alienating atmosphere, however she’s additionally a product of it.
Arnow, who additionally made the 2013 movie “I hate myself :)” has typically been in comparison with Lena Dunham as a generation-representing voice, for her willingness to bear all on display screen and for her proclivity for autobiography. (Ann’s mother and father within the movie are performed by Arnow’s real-life mom and father, Barbara Weiserbs and David Arnow.)
However Arnow’s sensibility is far dryer and extra satirical. Whether or not Ann can free herself of her circumstance is one factor, however Arnow, as a keenly insightful filmmaker, proves time and again that she has. How else are you able to clarify the trenchant absurdity of the poem-worthy dialogue that runs by the movie? A sexual companion whose first line is: “Thanks for forgiving me for mansplaining about L.A.” A boss who pronounces: “In the event you’re not on Spotify, you’re behind the occasions.” And Ann, who after debasing herself along with her older lover, says, “The candles have been good,” just for him to answer: “There was only one candle.”
“The Feeling That the Time for Doing One thing Has Handed,” a Magnolia Footage launch, is unrated by the Movement Image Affiliation however comprises grownup nudity and language. Working time: 87 minutes. Three stars out of 4.