There’s such intimacy and care in Sarah Friedland’s gaze that her film “Familiar Touch” glows with love. You can glimpse it shine brightly from every pore of the way she tells the story of her central character, Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), a woman in her eighties battling the onset of dementia. In the opening, Ruth prepares for a meeting with a man. We see things from her perspective. It seems like a date. She is filled with timid anticipation as she sets the house, puts things in place, and rustles up dishes. He is wary, though, when she tries to steer the conversation into date chatter. She gets into his car. They look like they are headed somewhere.
Ruth is surprised when the car arrives at a care facility. She’s informed it’s her son, Steve ( H. Jon Benjamin), and the assisted living center, Bella Vista, which she herself had chosen in a more cogent mental frame, would be her home from now on. But she never wanted to be a mother. Even if you have surmised the turn of the situation, the scene hits like a wall of bricks.
Initially, Ruth is in denial. She insists to the soft-mannered doctor Brian (Andy McQueen) that she’s perfectly right. She rattles off long details of a menu, her roots, her family specifics. Surely everything’s fine with her, otherwise she couldn’t have remembered all these. That’s not how it works, Brian tells her as kindly as he can.
Friedland places great emphasis on tactility. Touch, as indicated in the title itself, is vital to an emotional connection. It becomes the entry and locus point of her filmmaking in “Familiar Touch.” As much as it swirls through the many layers of subconsciousness, it’s a profoundly sensory film. Memories and personhood turn into shifting surfaces. Ruth is hit by a swell of childhood memories, even as she loses her bearings on the present and the now.
Friedland integrates the waves of memories blowing at her with a lovely, congruent flow. Neat demarcations in her mind are increasingly fragile and wavering. So, she suddenly barges into the kitchen in the center and takes over the breakfast arrangements. Slowly, over the course of the film, she progresses from deflecting an acknowledgment of the true measure of her circumstance to meeting it head-on.
“Familiar Touch” is an incredibly pure film. You feel held just as Ruth is in Friedland’s gaze, which never strays from a nurturing focus solely and fully devoted to her perspective. She makes us inhabit Ruth’s flickering sense of memory and comprehension without the faintest trace of exploitative flashy techniques. Friedland is interested in the frail, tender humanity of a tough, inevitable circumstance.
There’s ample room here for sentimental excesses, but this is an amazingly unblinkingly pragmatic avatar of storytelling that never falls for those lazy tricks like consciously working to eke out our emotions. It’s the clear-eyed honesty that instantly immerses us. That’s not to say there are no emotional gut punches in the film. What Friedland does with those is far smarter and more dignifying and ever-attuned to Ruth’s emotional and inner reality.
The film pays generous attention to not just the crashes in and out of one’s memory but also upholds the act of a body transforming as something sacrosanct. It’s not a bodily decay but importantly yet another period in life, as one grows from one point to the next. “Familiar Touch” rests its crest on the mighty Kathleen Chalfant, whose unforgettable, molecularly registering performance can smash every bit of your heart to smithereens. When Ruth is brought back to the center after straying, she asks with finality, “I’ll live here for the rest of my life?” Chalfant’s line reading will take a piece out of you.
Such material usually attracts actorly exhibitionism; Chalfant rejects it in a stripped-down performance reverberating with emotional ache and wondrous truth. There’s a directness, a confrontational edge to her that is also inviting. “Familiar Touch” is warm and wise and staggeringly minute in its understanding of small moments. So, too, they assume monumental proportions and accrue maximum impact.
There are massive shifts, ruptures in one’s awareness of what’s happening around them, and a subsequent weary, melancholic re-illumination. A devastating moment arrives when Ruth determinedly repeats to herself the name and identity of her son, ultimately conceding defeat. She’ll not be able to remember it anyway, she regretfully tells herself. Overall, “Familiar Touch” is toweringly authentic filmmaking, quietly perceptive to every flitting shade of its character’s evolving truth.
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