Profoundly tender and yet untainted by the slightest trace of sentiment, this intimate and frankly sensual drama follows elderly Ruth (American stage icon Kathleen Chalfant) as she adjusts to a major change in circumstances. Told with an audacious economy that unveils key details only when absolutely necessary, the film hints at what’s going on when Ruth treats the washing up rack like a toast caddy.
Minutes later, a middle-aged man named Steve (H Jon Benjamin), with whom Ruth slyly flirts at first until he reveals he’s already married, arrives at her home to take her to her new home in a retirement community. When the staff there refer to Steve as Ruth’s son, the reveal is as shocking to her as it is to us.
It becomes quite clear that Ruth has significant short-term memory loss, although she can still reel off the recipe for a scrummy-sounding borscht. Turns out, she was once a professional cook, and one of the film’s most amusing sequences finds her invading the home’s kitchen and taking over the plating of the scrambled eggs and fruit salad for the residents.
This exceptional debut narrative feature from writer-director Sarah Friedland (whose previous films focused on dance) draws from Friedland’s own experience with people with dementia – her own relatives and people she worked with in a care home earlier in her career. At the same time, the film’s intense focus on bodies and palpable sensation (it’s not called Familiar Touch for nothing) connects it to Friedland’s work as a choreographer.
Indeed, there’s something theatrical and specifically terpsichorean in one lovely interlude where a carer attends to Ruth in a swimming pool, swishing her rhythmically back and forth in the water like a relaxed infant, as the soundtrack gradually conjures the remembered sounds of a day at the beach – gulls, calliope music and childish shrieks of delight.
What’s so affecting about this moment and so many others is that the film doesn’t treat Ruth’s cognitive shift like a great tragedy, a loss of self or a sentimentally imagined transmutation into an adorable old lady. Ruth is still full of piss and balsamic vinegar, a bit spiky, a minx in her soignée short-haired way.
You can tell there’s a little bit of racist suspicion in the way she treats Black carer Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith) at first, offering to set her up on a date with her brother who is supportive of civil rights. And at one point, Ruth overhears Vanessa and doctor Brian (Andy McQueen) having a polite, coded conversation about how their own elderly parents aren’t being looked after in a quasi-country club facility like this.
The way Friedland subtly works in these little touches is truly impressive. But her finest achievement here may be casting Chalfant, who gives an astonishingly nuanced, considered and graceful performance. It may not get recognition from awards bodies, though, as it’s one that requires no prosthetics, showy speeches or weight fluctuations – just proper craft and actorly skill.
Familiar Touch is in UK and Irish cinemas from 19 June.
