You need a really great actor to pull off what “Familiar Touch” does and it’s no wonder why director Sarah Friedland brought in Kathleen Chalfant to play its central character Ruth. For those that missed her legendary turn on stage in Margaret Edson’s “Wit” as a Lit professor who wasn’t about to concede to her likely fate as a cancer patient, hints of that radiant performance have now been committed to film as she invests just as fully in playing a dementia-stricken senior who has to reengineer her life after her son Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) places her in an assisted living facility. In a situation where one would expect to see weakness, Chalfant instead projects strength, drawing on a savvy script from Friedland where Ruth believes she’s in a different reality from moment to moment, perhaps still cooking for herself while her parents were away at work as a teen or expecting her husband to come home when to anyone else it’s clear he passed away long ago. Between the conviction in her voice and the casual quality of the conversations, there’s little doubt that in spite of not being aligned with the world in front of her, the one that’s in her mind is fully formed and the onus shifts to the recipient to comprehend.
The condition can be obviously brutal, particularly when Ruth insists she doesn’t have children by saying she never wanted them in front of Steve with such an intensity that you know at one point it was true, but with such a nuanced performance from Chalfant, Friedland manages to find a different way to see it without being patronizing. Following the octogenarian to the Bella Vista retirement home where others also seem to be grasping at straws when their identities are a bit of a blur, the moments where they can strongly grab hold of something are extraordinary, with Ruth looking outside the window of her new living quarters for the first time, only to see a fellow resident who could instantly be considered crazy for taking off his shirt to bathe himself in the sun. Yet giving back as much light as is pouring onto his chest, it looks like he’s found the key to happiness before being pulled away by a dutiful orderly.
“Familiar Touch” may be told from Ruth’s perspective, but increasingly – and impressively – it opens up the space to contemplate how the people around those with such a shift in consciousness can meet them halfway. When the film’s sensitivity is immediately evident, it isn’t surprising to learn that Friedland herself had personally navigated these kinds of relationships herself in providing memory care and art lessons to aging adults, yet the director went one step further in setting up the production in a real assisted living facility in California where many of the residents and staff end up on screen alongside Chalfant. You’d be hard-pressed to tell the ringers from those for whom this is their everyday reality, which becomes one beautiful coalescence of many in the film where a part of being compassionate is knowing when to indulge fantasies or offering the truth when people are confused.
Although the bond that Ruth works out with her primary caregiver Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle) becomes one of the film’s loveliest threads, there are individual scenes between residents at Bella Vista that seem truly precious when people can become friends over breakfast and strangers again the next day. One such moment where a pair are caught humming the same song, forming a perfect harmony with one another feels like being let in on a secret language only they know and “Familiar Touch,” in its elegant pacing and gentle spirit, forges such a connection with the audience, establishing a language rooted in understanding rather than any fixed vocabulary that feels all the more special because the bond that it makes with each individual will be unique to them.
“Familiar Touch” will screen again at the Venice Film Festival on September 4th at the Astra 2 at 5 pm and the Astra 1 at 5:15 pm.