Familiar Touch: a lovingly told coming-of-old-age film

• Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film Festival

In the opening scene of Sarah Friedland’s wondrous narrative feature debut, Familiar Touch (2024), a regal older woman, Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), serves her signature dish – a meticulously mounted sandwich – to her much younger visitor. Over the meal, they carry on a polite yet puzzling conversation that comes across like a derailing Tinder date. She woos him shamelessly; he ducks, discomfited, then mentions his wife. Taken aback, she confesses she’s married too, stunned to learn that he in fact knows her husband. As they get into his car to go for a ride, she opens her palm for his hand to finally cup hers – to no avail. 

The opening’s push-and-pull of subverted expectations and lightly uncomfortable absurdity establishes Ruth as a woman who doggedly swerves obstacles, convinced that she’s in control. In reality though, Ruth is soon taken by Steve, who’s actually her son, not a potential lover, to an assisted-living facility of her prior choosing – one of the many facts she forgot. Revolted at what seems like a betrayal, and obstinately denying she ever had or even wanted children, Ruth must gradually accommodate herself to the abrupt loss of her elegant home in Los Angeles, of independence and sense of self-worth – and to accept that her new, circumscribed life is more than the meagre sum of its parts. That it is still worth living. 

Friedland, who won the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival, worked in a similar facility to the one she portrays. This fact accounts for her verité depiction, though not her tremendous skill in distilling just the right detail in a subtle, Chekhovian manner. Most observations are from Ruth’s point of view. At her first communal meal, she’s affronted when she’s not presented a menu, and impatiently waves at the nurses gossiping with their backs turned to her. Their posture signals that she’s not here to dictate her choices to others, but to follow routines – if not orders – instead. 

In fact, much of Friedland’s pointed social observation arises from the tension between Ruth as a consumer, whose wealth pays for the facility’s expensive amenities and, most of all, the numerous, attentive and specialised staff. She’s a patient, and must therefore be under constant observation and care, and abide by the facility’s rules. Humour is found in Ruth’s unwitting violation of such rules. Believing she’s still a professional cook, she invades the facility’s kitchen, bosses the chefs around, and dotes on the nurse and doctor, as if they were children entrusted in her care, and not the supervising staff, tending to hers.  

Friedland lovingly details not only Ruth’s well-meaning antics and bossy demeanour, but also her startled awakening. In a particularly piercing scene, Ruth shows up to the home’s speed-dating party only to be warned by a roomie that she’s not to pick up people from her own floor, because that’s a memory ward – in other words, for people slipping into dementia. Terrified, Ruth flees the hall, into town. The local supermarket, stocked with the fresh produce she cherishes, acts as a substitute for a homecoming. The escape also illustrates how tenaciously Ruth tries to hold on to her identity as a cook: someone free-willed, lucid, useful, creative. The scene echoes Ruth confidently rattling off a borscht recipe to a doctor at her first checkup in the home; but this time, the atmosphere is darker, more lonesome. When picked up and excoriated by the home’s nurse and doctor, whom she puts in a delicate position with her repeat insubordination, Ruth finally gives in. The facility, while never truly a home, is her last hope, her refuge. 

The human mind, in all its frailness and glory, is the real protagonist in Familiar Touch. Chalfant’s Ruth oscillates between pride and a childlike vulnerability – beaming, for instance, with the innocent joy of a preschooler, as she lists all the words she can think of starting with the letter “f”. She has a chilly reserve one minute and a motherly warmth the next, persuasively fleshing out the lightning-strike moments when Ruth suddenly feels her mind faltering. In Chalfant’s grounded performance, the agonising mind is finally assuaged by the resilience – rooted in the familiarity and the kind persistence – of the human touch.