Carefully calibrated banality

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This article was published 21/06/2024 (503 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Daringly morose and mopey, this indie film from writer, director and star Joanna Arnow manages to be sex-positive at the same time as it’s hilariously, unremittingly negative about almost everything else.

Arnow plays Ann, a 30-something New Yorker stuck in a personal and professional ditch. As suggested by that wordy title, Ann embodies millennial malaise.

With the traditional, conventional markers of adult life feeling either out of reach or irrelevant, Ann is stalled. Never mind driving a car, getting married or owning a home, she can’t even imagine throwing a party.

Ann has reached a comical stalemate in her casual, long-term BDSM relationship with an older man (played by Scott Cohen, one of those reliable New York character actors you might have seen in a Law & Order episode or as Max on Gilmore Girls). She’s in a quietly passive-aggressive emotional stand-off with her parents (played with off-kilter realism by Arnow’s real-life mother and father, Barbara Weiserbs and David Arnow).

And she’s trapped in a weirdly vague and amorphous office job. (We have no idea what she or the company does.)

“Still waiting to hear back,” Ann says when asked about the status of her current project, and that seems to apply to almost everything in her life

Early on, though, Ann wonders whether people can change. Arnow, whose previous works include the hybrid documentary I Hate Myself 🙂, spends the rest of the film providing a (very low-key) answer.

While The Feeling’s vibe is very New Yorky and highly millennial, the film’s closest tonal parallel might be the deadpan stylings of veteran Nordic filmmakers such as Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki.

Arnow presents Ann’s personal and professional ennui mostly through static, middle-distance shots and ordinary, oddly empty settings. It’s a carefully calibrated banality, however.

Likewise, the performances are seemingly played without affect. They are toneless, unsmiling and pancake flat, but they pull off a wry sense of absurdist comedy.

What keeps things going is Arnow’s constant oddball presence, along with her vulnerable and (literally) naked work. Ann is nude in the opening scene and proceeds to spend maybe one-quarter of her screentime wearing nothing but glasses.

The frequent sex scenes — often involving hyper-specific, arbitrary demands from the “masters” Ann meets online — aren’t played for erotic effect but for broad human comedy.

Almost all the scenes — sexual and otherwise — are excruciatingly awkward but also mercifully short, with a line or two of dialogue, sometimes even less. Arnow seems to be undertaking a precise experiment in what audiences can take. As the embarrassment and humiliation head toward unbearable cringe-comedy levels, she cuts away suddenly, just before you reach the point where you want to be swallowed up by the ground.

This trick is also seen in the story’s overall structure. Just as the repetitive rounds of work, family, sex start to seem like too much, Arnow shows Ann making some tentative attempts to change her life.

After a tricky beginning — in her new online dating profile, Ann lists her interests as “dense foods that sit heavily in the stomach” — we get some muted hope in the arrival of Chris (Succession’s Babak Tafti). By the standards of this melancholy cinematic world, he’s a very cheerful guy, and he might be what Ann needs, if she can only figure that out.

As astute readers have probably already realized, this film is not for everyone. But if you’re into radical dreariness, Arnow is definitely one to watch.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com