‘The Feeling’ Review: Fifty Shades of Apathy

Joanna Arnow’s attention-grabbing debut “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” has been described as a sadomasochistic sex comedy, but it’s hard to laugh.

Arnow, who wrote, directed and stars in this sometimes-riveting, sometimes-dull study of demoralization, plays a dour 30-something New Yorker who spends her days getting pushed around by her boss (Armand Reiser). At night, she submits to the sexual commands of her various male masters, whom she meets online. The joke is that her days and nights aren’t that different.

And then the joke is on the audience when Arnow introduces us to six men in 30 minutes before we realize that we don’t yet know her character’s name. (It’s Ann.)

The film is structured by Ann’s partners, whose names appear in tidy white font on a black screen. They’re nearly always dressed; she’s almost always naked (though one partner, played by Parish Bradley, commands her to wear bunny ears and a pig nose). It’d be one thing if Ann enjoyed the sex. But from the snapshots we see, these encounters seem mostly humiliating and joyless. When obeying an order to touch herself in view of drivers on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, she just looks bored.

Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat. These glimpses of her character’s life could be stand-alone comic book panels. Together, they’re a mosaic of stagnation.