Joanna Arnow, director of The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, also plays the lead, Ann. Ann’s work and family lives aren’t at their best during the current moment, as she receives insults from coworkers. Her dating life is open to interpretation – as a submissive she goes on enough good dates. She goes on those dates with both doms and vanilla folks. Arnow divides her films between chapters, naming them after the dom and vanilla people with whom she has relations. Her main dom is Allen (Scott Cohen), a man she calls misogynistic but with whom she has a long stable relationship. She tries out other men like Thomas (Peter Vack), a dominant, and Chris (Babak Tafti), someone who is vanilla. The film, then, shows, among other things, her weighing the positives and negatives of who will make her happy.

This is the part of the review where I try to be nice, even if its depiction of dom and sub relationships can be iffy. I’m saying this as someone who is gay and yet finds dom and sub relationships as inherently ridiculous. A scene where Allen tells Ann to suck his nipple points to how doms and subs take themselves seriously. Awkward segue, but even if Chris isn’t the most attractive of her main sexual partners, the movie ‘prefers’ him. This isn’t total favouritism in ways that I hope to explain later in this review. But she is more open to him than others. He points it out during the time when she invites him to her place. One knows the feelings are real when one gets that invitation. That probably speaks to The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed and how it depicts growth.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed shows some character growth, sure, but it’s too bad that it looks terrible. These aesthetic blunders are specifically conspicuous whenever Ann shares the screen with racialized characters. I don’t know how many times I have to complain about this in movies, but please light Black actors much better. Ann shares the screen with two Black characters here and Arnow doesn’t light them enough to show their features. At this point, I’m giving up on contemporary digital cameras and how they don’t capture Black people well. I also used not just the word Black but racialized which means that even the white passing MENAs look bad here too.

Even if the writing likes Chris, the camera seems not to, because there are shots here where he looks featureless too. Arnow is getting comparisons to Lena Dunham, whose idea of representation is showing that dumpy people have sex. The difference here is that yes, Dunham doesn’t always hit her high notes. But at least she’s actually going to do her best to reach them.

Arnow, instead, is reaching for deadpan. It’s the other characters around her that do all the heavy lifting. This contrast, sadly, doesn’t work, and so does her failed attempts towards awkward and cringe comedy that seems passé. All she does during sex scenes is break up the vibe. I guess that’s the film’s way of subverting the power between Ann and the doms. The Feeling That the Time… is showing funny situations and sexual situations but the scenes here sadly don’t come off as either.

Stream The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed on MUBI.