Author of several documentaries and short films, Joanna Arnow, director born in New York, where she still lives, has finally decided to embark on a first feature film, largely autobiographical, which we can say is not did not go unnoticed. The film was presented, in 2023, at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, then in competition at the Deauville American Festival. While she had given up on becoming an actress, believing, from her first castings, when she was a teenager, that the exercise did not suit her, she chose, in Life According to Ann, to take the leading role. A doubly inflated decision since she plays a young New Yorker whose portrait takes shape through her sexual experiences, all directed towards submission. Consented practice which results, literally and figuratively, in a real exposure.
“Life According to Ann” is based on minimalist production, in particular concerning the sex scenes filmed in long sequence shots, by a still camera placed at a distance. When did this idea emerge?
In fact, it’s a bias that I had in mind from the start. Because I like sequence shots that last a long time. Cinema no longer accustoms us to this duration. However, the long term integrates the idea of discomfort. It also allows the eye to wander. The person looking at it absorbs the image, creating their own rhythm. It is more reactive, more sensitive to what can happen to the right and to the left – places where precisely, in Life According to Ann, There’s always something going on. Something dissonant which reflects the way in which the characters apprehend what they experience and react to what surrounds them. Life According to Ann is a conceptual comedy: it is through this minimalist staging that the film achieves this very particular humor.
Precisely, your film, which you are very keen to qualify as a “BDSM comedy”, uses a very tongue-in-cheek, non-frontal humor, which may escape some people. Can you tell us about it?
Humor is subjective, it depends on each person. It was important for me to leave this space to the viewer, to grant them freedom of interpretation, so that they could experience the scenes according to their own story and sensitivity. I didn’t want to be too clear in my intentions, I wanted things to be as credible and subtle as in life. In the film, small changes, small clues or a gesture appear, while we have become accustomed to nothing happening, and this is what can become funny, provoke laughter or not . The humor comes from the breakup. And then the indirect humor creates interstices through which darker, more serious things can slip in, such as the loneliness of the characters.
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