Cannes Ones To Watch: ‘The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed’ Writer-Director Joanna Arnow

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You know an artist must be doing something special when even Andrew Bujalski, the godfather of mumblecore, calls their work “excruciating and extraordinary.” But this is where Brooklyn-based director and comic-book writer Joanna Arnow is right now, after a string of darkly funny shorts that might be said to combine the sexual candor of early Chantal Akerman with the sardonic humor of Todd Solondz.

Cannes audiences, then, must brace themselves for her feature debut, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, which premieres in the festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section and which she describes as “a mosaic-style comedy following the life of a woman as time passes in her long-term casual BDSM relationship, low-level corporate job, and quarrelsome Jewish family.” Surprisingly — or perhaps not, given the genesis of her best-known film I hate myself, a documentary that started to take a new direction when a bitter row with a boyfriend was accidentally recorded — Arnow was expecting to debut with a different movie. “But my previous project had gotten delayed,” she says, “and I needed to feel artistically engaged with something new.” Similarly, she hadn’t always planned to be a director. “I wanted to be an actor when I was growing up, but in college I was too nervous to audition.

I didn’t quite know what to do after giving up in a big way, until I was blown away by a history of world cinema class and decided to divert my interests into film.” As someone who thinks she shares “a lot” with George Costanza in Seinfeld, Arnow is thrilled to debut in Cannes. “I hope people think it’s funny, and that they will relate to the absurd humor of a character figuring out how to be.