Magnolia Pictures
An adult sex comedy that’s also the most amusingly unerotic film of the year, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, which hits theaters April 26, treads into explicit terrain in order to chart the disaffection and confusion of a thirtysomething Brooklynite in search of direction, fulfillment, and companionship. Written and directed by star Joanna Arnow, this bracingly awkward indie—which played at last year’s Cannes, Toronto, and New York film festivals—is a portrait of millennial estrangement and discontent that, despite suffering from sporadic redundancy, strikes a raw cringe-comedy nerve.
In New York City’s trendiest borough, Ann (Arnow) lies nude in bed beside Allen (Scott Cohen), an older lover whose eyes stay closed as she begins humping his leg. “I love how you never care if I cum. And you don’t do anything for me,” she announces in a monotone come-hither manner. “It’s so disrespectful and misogynist.” When she gets no response, she drops her head to his chest and asks, “Do you think people can change?” Roused to actively engage with this, Allen merely sighs and states, “I don’t know.” This prompts Ann to resume her dry-humping routine and attendant dirty talk, declaring, “I like how you don’t care if I get off because it’s like I don’t even exist.” This may be true about Allen, but he mostly just comes across as exasperated by his partner’s shtick, staring at her and saying, “Can you not?”
Ann tells Allen that he’s the only one she’s seeing but theirs is a decidedly uncommitted relationship, as well as a BDSM one in which she’s the “submissive” and he’s the “master.” During their encounters, Allen has Ann do things like repeatedly suck his nipples and then run to a bedroom wall, or walk over to a dresser, bend over, and spread her cheeks—an act that’s made all the more humiliating by the fact that this positions Ann’s face directly in front of photographs of turn-of-the-20th-century immigrant relatives, whose eyes stare back at her as if asking, “Is this what we struggled for?” Ann, however, is far from a victim in this scenario, since she eagerly seeks such treatment, and her later trysts with other men further reinforce the sense that her sexual proclivities are a means of attaining the power she doesn’t have in any other aspect of her life.
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