The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed & quiet dinners
Plus I finally got into Sailor
Just this week the Cannes Film Festival kicked off its grand affair—for which I’m furiously refreshing the Twitter accounts of a few trusted critics and this grid. Today I’m talking about a film that premiered at Cannes last year that’s finally in theaters now. It’s a singular work by Brooklyn filmmaker Joanna Arnow, though I’m may be biased, hewing close in age to its milieu of aspiring 30-somethings. That, and more, below.
i. Short takes
ii. Joanna Arnow’s new indie-comedy
iii. Sailor in Fort Greene
When your birthday falls on a Monday the proper thing to do is to celebrate the weekend both before and after. I learned the hard way that a Monday night out does irreparable damage to your body for the rest of the week.
Arbitrarily kicked things off a friends and frosé (do not recommend) at LA VILLA. Park Slope’s platonic ideal of an Olive Garden (a gathering place for confirmations and jr. high basketball games) that feels airlifted from the suburbs, a tonic to the “instagram Italian” of Pasta Louise.
A dear friend treated me to ultra prime dry-aged BBQ and a bottle of Northern Italian red at COTE. Simon Kim’s fancy Korean steakhouse and temple to beef remains a premiere destination for festivities and I cannot wait to return.
SOFREH CAFE has returned with its rosewater doughnuts but I think the best bits to be had are at least slightly savory—kuku sabzi laced with walnuts and barberries, piroshki beef buns, the nokhodchi (chickpea cookies) shot through with cardamom. Strong black tea with a plate of orange and raisin cookies that taste felicitously like vanilla icing.
A morning trip to BREAD AND SALT yielded a plush triangle of brioche wedged with a slice of prosciutto cotto and fontina—the Italianate version of a ham and cheese croissant. I ate half on the spot and saved the rest so I could toast it later and cash in on its intrinsic cache of butter.
Pasticciotto, my favorite Italian treat. A rounded rectangle of sweet pastry dough with vanilla pastry cream, lemon zest.
The best thing I ate though were fried squash blossoms. Discreetly stuffed with mozzarella and anchovies, the latter infusing the former with a brilliant streak of brine.
If you can believe it, MEL THE BAKERY in Hudson is even better than it was in the LES. Ample space and stock, too.
At KREUNG CAMBODIA’s pop-up in Rhinebeck, I found Khmer noodles and fermented chilis a perfect match for the honeyed sweetness of black currant liqueur from C. Cassis. The cocktail with sunchoke juice in particular paired nicely. They’re in the midst of fundraising for their first brick-and-mortar Bong, to open in the old Ursula space.
To have a perfect meal at STISSING HOUSE (which has expanded into
), all you need are ham, cheese, oysters, and coconut cake.To come: A full insider’s guide to Upstate for paid subscribers. Here’s where I throw out the paradoxically condescending and unhip confession ~~*I grew up there*~~
Writer, actor, and filmmaker Joanna Arnow has been fearlessly exploring the boundaries of relationships and women's desires, often as they rub up against present circumstances and norms. This can be seen in her shorts, which are playing on Metrograph At Home and the Criterion Channel. And while the nudity on display is unflinching, it avoids any sense of exploitation. In fact, it is “shockingly average nakedness,” and therein lies the provocation. Sometime last year, I-D declared her new movie The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed the latest entry in the “girl pervert canon.” (The article, along with the rest of the site, has been taken down for a facelift funded by new CEO Karlie Kloss.) In a similar vein, just as there is the concept of #girldinner, Arnow shows us “girl pervert dinner”—how women eat in the real world. She treats food the same way she treats sex and nudity, with the film’s meal scenes running parallel to its sex scenes, startling and endearing in their ordinariness.
A fragmentary portrait of 30-something life in New York, The Feeling is a brilliantly timed drip of deadpan. The story—a series of abbreviated yet impactful vignettes— catalogs lead character Ann’s (Arnow) experiences working at nameless corporations not worth describing in detail, spending quality time with her parents, and moving on from her longtime dominant partner Allen (Scott Cohen) toward new ones. Each sequence is just long enough to deliver a punchline, and together they create a mosaic of Ann’s life. What’s going on in her head is opaque, but in a way that’s indicative of depth rather than making her an enigma. She comes off more relatable and engaged than impassive. Arnow’s mode of storytelling and self-deprecation isn’t flavored with cynicism, and whatever we think of as “shame” has been reclaimed. I walked away stirred by how, even with such deliberate and potentially distancing artistic choices, the film captures a lot of, well, feeling.
Arnow does this primarily by focusing on in-between moments, the empty spaces and ellipses that shape our existence. We’re not merely glimpsing her sexual encounters, but also witnessing the prosaic moments of “nothing” between characters’ interactions—arguably another kind of intimacy. Arnow told me it was her intent to showcase things like partners eating together, which often goes unnoticed in other films.
Prioritizing banalities isn’t at all new in cinema. Nor is drawing attention to the passage of time, as Arnow does through Feeling’s elliptical structure. Chantal Akerman stretched the minutes and hours with Jeanne Dielman assembling her schnitzel; Ann has a plastic pouch of lentils, squeezed to the very last drop into a microwavable glass bowl. The brown goop is less gross than it is an absurd reminder that eating is a necessary act for most of us. Mealtime here is devoid of the lavishness or dramatic significance that often accompanies the table in cinema. Take a scene in which Ann and relatives have gathered around her parent’s dining room for Memorial Day to eat (mostly) civilly. That quiet isn’t impregnated with conflict, but with a nonchalance that’s exaggerated by the film’s spareness, which rings true to life, the way lulls in family conversation sometimes are and sometimes aren’t awkward.
One moment when food transcends its perfunctory nature in the film occurs on a beach, when Ann's new boyfriend (Babak Tafti) introduces her to pickled herring. The scene elevates eating from obligation to a moment of connection, reflecting the shared experience between two individuals in a relationship. Food becomes a subject of shared enjoyment and laughter, facilitating a moment of vulnerability and reciprocity.
What else:
An ice cream cone enjoyed in the summer heat at the peak of Smith/9th Street captures a private moment of joy.
In one scene, Allen orders Chinese food, which Ann then eats in the nude at the table. She opts for plastic utensils instead of metal, to his chagrin—a small metaphor for how Ann feels about herself, as Arnow explains it.
Ann’s mother tells her she eats too many snacks.
As part of my birthday I forced Z into standing around with me Saturday evening to try and to get into Sailor. You can find my thoughts on whether it was worth it below, in my first post for paid subscribers.
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