“Do you think people can change?” Ann (Joanna Arnow) asks her long-term dominant Allen (Scott Cohen) toward the beginning of Joanna Arnow’s second feature, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. Told through a series of comic vignettes, the film follows Ann through an indeterminate period of time in her early 30s as she navigates relationships, awkward family dinners, a bland corporate job, and the possibility of changing from her now-ensconced ways. As can be gleaned from its title, the potential for action or growth is faint, and Arnow builds a unique comedic style around a persistent sense of disappointment. The dominant tone is one of melancholic absurdity, with an airy timing à la the stilted awkwardness of Roy Andersson used to imbue scenes with a heaping of uneasy deadpan space on their front and back ends. We always seem to enter a scene too early or too late, beginning after the start of a conversation or moving on from a romantic partnership without ever witnessing Ann’s breakup; Arnow elides melodrama to focus on the temporal disconnect of a character whose life seems to be slowly sliding out of view.
More than that, it’s a heavily gag-based comedy and city symphony evocative of Chaplin’s City Lights in its curiosity toward the everyday experience of urban space and interest in exploring ordinary characters. In this work of autofiction, Arnow builds a world that feels startlingly authentic, even casting her parents to play Ann’s own and building a sharp sense of specificity toward the New York neighborhoods where her characters live. This is also felt exquisitely in physical comedy that seeks numerous pleasures from small moments of contemporary life such as picking an ugly yoga mat at class, making a gloppy microwave meal that looks like diarrhea, or the joy of eating ice cream while waiting for the subway late at night. This is a deceptively small film that masks much depth and emotion underneath its modest front, and I was eager to talk to Arnow to find out more about her process and feelings toward the work.
The Film Stage: I would like to start by talking about the balance between fiction and auto-fiction in the film. How did you handle working with material which is highly personal and incorporates details of your life, but is, at root, fictional?
Joanna Arnow: It’s fictional, but it has elements that draw from personal experience. I cast myself to play a fictionalized version of myself and I cast my parents to play the parents in the film. It has a lot of personal details that I’m proud of. For example: we shot in certain locations that are real locations from my life. My goal was to create an authentic story that I hoped folks could relate more to, and which could help me mine the specificity of the humor more deeply. Everything changes so much when you put it into a story form––even one that’s somewhat minimalist and nontraditional––but telling a truthful story wasn’t the aim in any way. So that’s why it’s not autobiographical and so much of it is fictional or altered. However, I hope that mining that specificity will make the film resonate with others and make it funnier.
What was it like working with your parents? How much did you work to create characters for them and how much were you trying to approach them as people, as who they are?
A lot of the scenes sounded familiar to them, but this is in a fictional world so things were changed. My discussion with them about acting was not so much about character as opposed to the intention and timing of the scenes, because I had very specific ideas about the comedic timing. They were written with these rhythms and long pauses in mind.
I really loved the rhythm that you created in the film and those long pauses between words which you just mentioned. How did you develop that as a style? And at what point did you see that become a fundamental element of the film?
I was interested in using elliptical storytelling and short scenes to give a very impressionistic view of the protagonist’s experience. I feel like time sometimes feels like it’s passing very quickly, but other times it passes slowly. So I wanted to create different formal rules for the five sections of the film to reflect that variation of experience. In terms of its non-traditional structure, I have been interested in concise humor for a while, so I decided to push further with that and wrote lots of very short, one- or two-line scenes that drew on personal experience. So the structure and interest in playing with rhythm, as it reflects our experience of time, was something that was with me from the beginning.
Joanna Arnow
I felt like the rhythm you build in the film and the vignette structure also works well with the title, building a feeling when we enter scenes that we’ve missed important moments that’ve just occurred.
Yeah, the title refers to a scene that happens close to the end of the film, and it just seemed appropriate for a film that reflects on the way time passes in our lives. To me, this is a comedy first and foremost, so the length of the title and the angst in it also feels comedic to me. We’re all a little tired of typing it out, but I still think it’s worth it.
How did you develop the visual language of the film and the visual comedy? I admired the gag-based structure and that there are so many scenes that are simply small bits of physical comedy outside of the domain of the story, like the moment when she’s pouring out her microwave dinner.
I wanted to use long takes and wides so that we can see the full, comically absurd context of the actions as they unfold. I also wanted the camera to be locked-down, to avoid shallow focus and complete symmetry, kind of reflecting the uncomfortable way the character exists in the world. Our terrific DP, Barton Cortright, worked with me to find those dissonant, slightly off compositions. A lot of the actions were staged to bring out comedy as well. For example: the scene where she’s told to run to the wall and back to the bed multiple times. It was very important to me for that to happen all on the same plane, from the camera, to emphasize the repetitiveness of the action because, to me, that’s part of the humor. If she had changed size, I think it wouldn’t have been as funny or as much of a necessary decision moment.
Can you talk about the class dynamics of the film? There was a strong focus on work and there is a wide range of class depicted in the movie amongst the different boyfriends she has. Why was it important to incorporate her working life and to have this array of different socio-economic types?
I really wanted to present this film and this character’s experience in its full entirety, and that includes class, political background, music, people eating food, etc. It’s like the feeling you get when you close your eyes at the end of the day and think about all the places you’ve been––there’s all of these shards of experience in front of you. Sometimes there’s similarities between them and sometimes they are kind of clashing against each other. I think it’s interesting to think about that collage of experience on a day-by-day level, then to also give more of a zoomed-back, topographical look at our lives over the years. It was part of that whole look at life.
There’s also a fidelity to the way you depicted the city––there’s such a focus on the minutia of transit of the different neighborhoods. I recognized where Chris lives in the film; later, when she’s on the bus, it was on that exact route from his place in Midwood to where I assume Ann lives, in Gowanus. Was it important to you to have a certain way of depicting the city and relating to New York?
Yeah, it was important to me because I grew up in New York as well. There were spaces like the Smith 9th Street scene which I chose because it’s the highest one in the city and I wanted her in that moment to be feeling a sense of freedom. It’s a moment early on in the film where she expresses happiness in a more visible way than we’ve seen before. You only get a little bit of a sense that you’re at a high space in that Smith 9th Street stop, but I feel like it’s enough that it really makes a difference for me. But thank you. No one’s ever complimented the transit accuracy before.
I’d like to talk about the power dynamics and the submissive-dominant dynamics in the film. How did you feel about depicting the submissive dynamics, and what were some of your feelings around depicting the role and relationship of a submissive? I felt that you did a really good job depicting the humiliation Ann sometimes chooses while also giving her a lot of dignity and power.
I think there are a lot of misconceptions about BDSM and what it means to be submissive. I wanted to take care to show Ann as an active participant in the planning of these sessions. In my experience, people involved in BDSM have to be triply respectful and communicative, and I wanted the film to reflect that. When you mentioned humiliation: I don’t see anything in this film as humiliating because it’s something that she seeks out and is in control of, of that process. I think it’s all dignity as far as I’m concerned.
I was also interested in depicting the BDSM and sex scenes in a very non-sensational way that, to me, is true-to-life and says more about the character while also providing opportunities for comedy. There are a lot of discussions and intermediary steps around how things are going to work in BDSM that I think are very interesting materials to mine. I wanted to explore the humor of it because I think, ultimately, this is a very human way that we relate to each other, BDSM or not.
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed opens in theaters on April 26.