‘The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed’ Review: Joanna Arnow’s Hilarious and Clever Debut

variety.com:

Catherine Bray A Jewish thirtysomething, Ann (Joanna Arnow) has never been in a conventional relationship. She engages in submissive sexual relationships with “sexfriends” and seems dimly uneasy that the most longstanding of these, with Allen (Scott Cohen), is now clocking in at around a decade, with neither one of them knowing very much about the other.

She asks him about himself; it turns out he’s a Zionist. She rolls away from him. The anthropologist David Graeber has analyzed the harm caused to society and individuals by the existence of meaningless so-called “bullshit jobs.” Ann is employed in a classic example of one of these: the objectives are hazy, the prospects limited; she is given an award for having worked in her office for one year and has to tell them it’s actually been over three years — and perhaps even worse, she has to go to meetings and listen to Boomers say things like, “the iPhone was invented.” Ann’s mother (Barbara Weiserbs, Arnow’s actual mother) specializes in the kind of small talk that is essential well-meant, but represents such a masterpiece of pointlessness that it’s hard not to escape the suspicion she could be trolling or playing some elaborate parlor game.

The alternative is that a real live human adult is really, genuinely, asking whether you would like to take a banana with you on the train tomorrow, and if yes would you like to put it in your bag now.

Without wanting to throw anybody’s mother under the bus here, it all feels painfully relatable. These three respective strands — sexual, professional, familial — are the major prisms through which we view Ann’s life.