Joanna Arnow Reflects on Her Directors’ Fortnight Debut ‘Feeling’: ‘I Don’t Try to Be Provocative for the Sake of Being Provocative’
variety.comGregg Goldstein Joanna Arnow is understandably stressed. The writer/director/actor is recovering from a long bout of COVID and about to premiere her narrative feature debut, “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” in the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes. “Having COVID while trying to finish this is such a crunch,” she says.On the one hand, she shouldn’t be too worried.
Indie film sensation Sean Baker is exec producing it, and she won a Berlinale Silver Bear Jury Prize for her 2016 short “Bad at Dancing.” Her semi- and fully autobiographical works have passionate admirers like Andrew Bujalski and Baker. “When he saw ‘Dancing,’ he wrote me a kind message about it and stayed in touch,” Arnow says.But she also has detractors like New York Times critic Jeannette Catsoulis, who described Arnow’s 2013 autobiographical and darkly comic documentary “i hate myself :)” as “whiny,” and called her apparently emotionally abusive relationship with her then-boyfriend “a pretty standard sadomasochistic setup, only without the kinky accouterments.”That may have been prescient.
In “Feeling,” she portrays a glum New Yorker in an ongoing BDSM relationship with an older man, played by Scott Cohen (“The Americans”), along with other lovers.
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