Built around a meticulous and delicate performance by Kathleen Chalfant, Sarah Friedland’s debut film is a precise, funny and deeply moving portrait of a woman adjusting to a nursing home.
How does someone with dementia see the world?
For Ruth, an octogenarian widow, it seems like a good date for a late-life date. The man is younger, very nice, and has an interesting job in sustainable architecture, though she’s embarrassed to admit at first that she’s forgotten his name. She prepares her favorite brunch for them — salmon and cream cheese on toast, carefully and graciously assembled, topped with a flurry of fresh herbs — before he whisks her away on a surprise trip. When she arrives at the hotel, the lobby is clean and comfortable, though she’s taken aback by the staff’s soothing tone and by the fact that her date calls her his mother. “I’m not a mother,” she clarifies. “I didn’t want children.” It’s a moment of intense discomfort and acute tenderness — a delicate balance that Sarah Friedland’s remarkable debut, “Familiar Touch,” maintains for a tight but searching 91 minutes.
As viewers suspected before Ruth (a superb Kathleen Chalfant), she’s checked into Bella Vista, a luxury nursing home not far from her bright, cheerful, story-filled suburban Los Angeles home, though it might as well be a different world entirely. Her suitor, in fact, is her son, Steven (H. Jon Benjamin), who hands her over to the nursing staff with barely dry eyes that you know will crack and overflow the moment he’s out of his mother’s sight. And the move isn’t an ambush: Ruth is told she’s visited these properties before, and even approved. But as she gazes around her new, clean, impersonal beige room, she can’t help but feel as if her life has been hijacked, thrown into a hostile unknown, no matter how kindly the advances of her new caregiver, Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle).
Premiering at Venice’s Orizzonti sidebar — with a series of festival dates to follow, and likely plenty of distributor interest, too — “Familiar Touch” is the latest in a recent wave of films, from “The Father” to “Relic” to “Dick Johnson is Dead,” that tackle the challenges and trauma of living with dementia. It’s a condition often treated onscreen as an inoffensive movie-of-the-week affair, or conjured up with disorienting levels of psychological trickery. But Friedland’s film takes neither approach: It’s a straightforwardly structured character study, humane but unsentimental, that’s notable for the priority it gives to Ruth’s perspective, portraying her not as a victim or a patient but as the bright, capable woman she still largely feels she is.
