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Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) is an elegant, inquisitive woman in her 80s. Living independently in southern California, she prepares breakfast for herself in the sun-dappled kitchen of her quiet residence, surrounded on all sides by finely crafted furniture, photo frames, bookshelves, and other mementos from a life well-lived. A retired cook, Ruth knows this recipe by heart. But her mind and body are less in harmony than they once were; hearing a ding, she retrieves a crisp slice of bread from the toaster and instinctively places it on the dishrack.
It’s not the only moment of confusion that Ruth has been experiencing. At her dining-room table with a son (H. Jon Benjamin) whom she fails to recognize, she speaks of her late husband in the present tense and sometimes mistakes her guest for a suitor. After they finish eating, he drives her to Bella Vista, a memory-care facility that he reminds Ruth she had selected herself, some time ago. And so begins Ruth’s transition to an assisted-living community where—with the support of care workers Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle) and Brian (Andy McQueen)—she finds new ways to retain a sense of self.
Ruth is suffering from dementia, but her condition is not treated as some terrible revelation, nor as a period of crisis. In “Familiar Touch,” as her cognitive faculties ebb and flow, Ruth’s other senses become heightened and more meaningful. In place of verbal conversation, taste and texture can communicate volumes, and the comforting sensation of a hand touching her back brings the lucidity of a lost memory rushing back.
Now in select New York theaters and expanding wider June 27, via Music Box Films, this tender and evocative feature debut by writer-director Sarah Friedland—a filmmaker and choreographer inspired by both her grandmother’s experiences and her own time spent working as a caregiver for New York artists with dementia—remains grounded in Ruth’s evolving perspective even as it reveals her personality through external means, her clarity of expression through movement and gesture. Though Ruth’s psychological interiority remains fluidly (sometimes elusively) hers, what Friedland conveys is the sense of a woman still coming of age in this next stage, finding and rediscovering sides of herself that her surroundings—and the symptoms of her illness—make newly relevant and accessible.
Filmed at Villa Gardens, a retirement community in Pasadena, in collaboration with its residents and care workers, “Familiar Touch” is an exercise in intergenerational empathy, challenging stereotypes around aging and care work through its attentive portrait of an older woman’s continuing agency, dignity, and desires. At its heart is a masterful performance from Chalfant, a veteran stage actress too rarely seen on screen; though her work is extraordinarily subtle and intimate, Chalfant brings to it also a galvanizing force of presence. Through their sensitively embodied and observed accumulation of detail, she and Friedland show us the journey of a life.
“Familiar Touch” premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, where it won three top prizes from the Orizzonti competition, including the Lion of the Future (for best feature debut), Best Director (for Friedland), and Best Actress (for Chalfant). Since then, the film has traveled far on the worldwide festival circuit, including as the opening title of this year’s New Directors/New Films and an official selection of the Chicago Critics Film Festival. Ahead of the film’s theatrical release, Friedland and Chalfant sat down to discuss “the politics of embodiment,” the fine nuances of scripting movement, and disrupting old narratives of decline.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Sarah, you’re a filmmaker and choreographer, and you’ve described yourself as “working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies.” How did you arrive at that intersection, exactly?
Sarah Friedland: They were on a collision course during my teen years. I had been studying dance, but never had the skill to be a professional dancer, nor the interest. I loved studying dance as a way to almost learn a language, to break down the world around me. It helped me figure out how much of our social world exists through movement patterns and these social choreographies that we all perform.
I continued studying choreography in college and was, at the time, first starting to play with filmmaking. My first student films were all of dances that I had made, but those dances were largely about pedestrian and everyday movement. There was this collision course of the two, and I found that I kept making dances as a student, whereas I actually just wanted to be making films of movement. I would choreograph these pieces where I wanted someone to be looking at the performer’s face or their elbow, with this level of specificity around scale, of what you see when.
Making experimental dance films was my entry point into filmmaking, and my first experiences directing were with dancers. Through these relationships and practicing on my peers as a student, I really learned how to work with a company of performers. After university, my first forays into filmmaking involved making this series of shorts looking at different patterns of social choreography, from how older adults move around their homes to active-shooter drills, lockdown drills, and the history of Boy Scout preparatory exercises. I’m really fascinated by the politics of social choreography.
My work up until “Familiar Touch,” and what I would take into “Familiar Touch,” was focused on the politics of embodiment. And as much as this is a scripted, fictional film, Kathy and I would talk about Ruth through her body as well. We were definitely thinking about the relationship between embodiment and aging, also in terms of her character’s desire. That was a significant thread for us. “Familiar Touch” isn’t a dance film, but I went about writing it as if it were, and that practice is very much woven into the DNA of this film.
Kathy, to build upon what Sarah’s saying about scripting movement: you’ve appeared in many Broadway and off-Broadway plays. How did that stage training and theater career inform your performance in this film, particularly as it pertained to that idea of physical embodiment?
Kathleen Chalfant: One of the things that’s important, always, to remember about the movies—which is different from working on the stage—is that someone else decides what the audience looks at. The only thing that happens, from the point of view of the movie, is the thing that there’s a picture of. This means that it is the filmmaker, the editor, and the cinematographer who decide what movement is to be seen. Coming from the theater, I guess, I had the idea that your entire body is always engaged, that it isn’t a neck-up activity, right?
Also—quite by accident, because I’m not a dancer—I’ve been involved very closely with two choreographers: Yvonne Rainer, with whom I’ve made a whole bunch of movies, not dances, and Pam Tanowitz in the “Four Quartets.” That was one of the connections that Sarah and I had. I think it is the idea that, when you work on the stage, you act from the bottom of your feet to the end of your fingers, all the time. People always talk about the difference between film acting and stage acting, and I don’t think there’s an enormous difference; the thing they have in common is that you fill the available space, both in speaking and in moving.
The great thing about the movies is that they really are play-pretend, because you’re in a real environment. And this movie was so meticulously planned; Sarah and Gabe [C. Elder,] the cinematographer, had a shot list, because we had a very short time—just 18 and a half days—to shoot it. It was a wonderful circumstance for an actor, because you could walk into this entirely safe place, know where you were supposed to go, and trust that the people who were watching would take what they needed from what you had to offer.
Self-expression is everything in “Familiar Touch,” and your film’s focus on bodily experience has the effect of heightening our understanding of not only Ruth’s memory loss but the senses of self that emerge from that condition. Even with her cognitive self fading, Ruth’s agency and expression are carried forward in movements and gestures, through touch and taste.
Friedland: The way I would describe that idea is that I was thinking about a character study where the character’s sense of self is located not primarily in her cognition, but in her senses. The realization for me, which led to writing the film in that way, came from my experience working as a care worker for New York City artists with dementia. One of the things I learned about memory loss is that, as much as people’s cognition declines, their other senses are often heightened. I started thinking about the tragic narrative that we have surrounding people with memory loss: that they’re losing themselves, that they’re declining, that they’re slipping away.
Here, I was trying to think about what parts of them still persist—and not only persist but are intensified. Who we are as people is not just cognitive; that’s a very rational, neoliberal idea of a person, that we are our brain, its functioning, and what that allows us to do productively in a market-based society. Who we are is actually expressed through all of our senses; we literally make sense of the world and ourselves through our touch, taste, smell, proprioception, etc.
If we were to make a character study that wasn’t reinforcing this tragic narrative of decline, then the film had to find a language visually, sonically, and editorially that would capture Ruth’s personhood through her senses. As much as it’s a coming-of-old-age film, I think it’s just as much a film about a kind of sensory selfhood, if you will.
There are a number of ways that we did that. One was crafting a shot list that was primarily static. There are only a few occasions where the camera is tilting, panning, tracking. Most of the time it’s very still. The hope was, that way, once Kathy stepped into the frame and performed, we would be deeply attuned to the smallest of shifts in her expression, posture, and gesture.
Another was wanting to use what our cinematographer and I referred to as echoes; we would frame the same way and use the same lens for gestures that Kathy did that were similar in different parts of the movie. For example, when she opens her palm to Steve in the car ride, we use the exact same lens and optical diffusion as we do when she’s in the exam room, touching herself. We want there to be these experiences where a viewer might not know that we used the same lens but will almost feel a sense of déjà vu in their own body, so that these little sensory details might actually be experienced in a viewer’s body, rather than so much in their cognitive, conscious experience of the film.
The other way involved getting very particular about the sound design. In most films, you mix the sound in such a way that ambient sounds of a room go away. We did the opposite in this film: the HVAC, the person having a conversation on the other side of the room, and all of those details are amplified and orchestrated. This is all to say that we tried to craft a grammar for the film that would attune you to Ruth’s experiences through her senses, rather than through her cognition or ocular experience. There are only two POV shots in the film, so we were trying to find the perspective in her body, rather than in her cognition. On set, obviously, it comes alive with Kathy’s performance. That’s really what brings you to Ruth.
Chalfant: There’s a subject that no one ever wants to talk about, even though it’s important to the movie, and it’s certainly true for all human beings from the beginning to the end, which is Ruth’s sexuality. That was one of the things that particularly drew me to the project, because that part of your life, experience, and desire never goes away.
It was also wonderful to find a circumstance in which it wasn’t also thought to be creepy or something. It was just what happens, what people sense, what people live from the inside. People don’t feel loss all day, every day, from the inside. What people feel is life in all its parts: in its sound, in the wind blowing, in their sense of space. One of the most moving parts of the movie for me to play was the scene with Ruth alone on the street, because it was the only time in the movie in which she was adrift in space.
Friedland: That just resurfaced a memory from production that I hadn’t thought about since, in terms of Ruth’s sexuality. Of course, the film itself is really clear about not wanting to make her sexuality the butt of a joke, as older women’s sexuality so often is made into something to be laughed at in cinema. In trying to echo that on set, the first scene that we shot where Ruth is expressing her sexuality was the scene where she’s touching herself in the exam room, which we would call “the masturbation scene.” I remember we had a closed set, meaning most of the crew had to go outside the room, and I leaned down to you and quietly said, “Kathy, can we talk about masturbation?” And I remember you bellowed, “Yes, let’s talk about masturbation,” so the whole group could hear. [laughs] And that set the tone that we were not going to tiptoe around this.
What sense memory and desire share, as well, is this ability to summon forth sides of ourselves from different stages of our lives. Ruth revisits elements of her identity that exist within her but are called up by what she experiences sensorially. Kathy, one role that you have played at multiple points in your career—including just earlier this year—is that of Joan Didion, in a one-woman performance of “The Year of Magical Thinking,” adapted from her memoir. There, it’s grief over the loss of her husband that provokes intense memories and emotions, triggering what Joan describes as a “vortex effect.” Did you find points of overlap between these roles, related to that connection between memory and desire?
Chalfant: Well, it’s interesting, because I actually did “The Year of Magical Thinking” quite a lot, including for a four-week run in New York and a four-week run in New Haven. And then, every once in a while, I’ll do it again. My swan song for “The Year of Magical Thinking” has happened; I did it in a small chapel, in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. And there’s a way in which “The Year of Magical Thinking” is actually the opposite of “Familiar Touch,” because “The Year of Magical Thinking” is the description of an act of will. She finally lets go, at the very end, but the entire book—and her entire life for those three years—was spent staving off reality.
Ruth doesn’t have will in that way that’s connected, so she lives in the moment. I keep saying one of the joys of doing this movie was that it was finally a way to exercise what they always tell you in acting school, which is that you’re supposed to live in the moment. People with memory loss, by definition, live in the moment. I’m trying to think about whether thinking about Ruth informed this last performance of “The Year of Magical Thinking.” I’m sure it did, and I’m not quite sure how. Ruth was no longer in a circumstance in which she could stave off the vortex by will. And what happens, from time to time, in “The Year of Magical Thinking” is that Joan gives herself over to the vortex. In a way, it’s a form of abstinence. It’s falling off the wagon, willfully.
I’m from California too, and I’ve always loved Joan Didion. She writes better about California than anyone I know, and she always writes in the rhythm of driving. There’s a whole section in “The Year of Magical Thinking” about the way in which she used driving and routes—which is such a California thing to do—to stave off the vortex: by her not driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, John would still be wrapping Quintana in a towel on the deck outside the office. That was a kind of thinking that Ruth was not capable of any longer.
Friedland: Although… There’s one exception, I feel: the scene where she interprets the dining room as a restaurant. I mainly think that Ruth truly believes it’s a restaurant.
Chalfant: That’s what I think.
Friedland: But I think there’s a little bit of room for possibility that there’s magical thinking there.
Chalfant: There could be.
I wanted to ask about the scene with the care workers at the grocery store, after Ruth runs away from the community. Confronted by Ruth about the nature of the facility where she’s staying, Vanessa reflects that her truth is just a little different than Ruth’s, which distills that dual consciousness inherent in care work, between professional obligation and personal connection. Tell me about making a film set at a continuing-care community and illuminating the experience of care workers.
Chalfant: The nobility and the elegance of it are shown. The possibilities of it, the way in which it’s a creative activity all the time, is an important part of the movie.
Friedland: If you spend any amount of time with care workers, as Kathy said, you’ll see that it’s the most skilled and nuanced work. You have to be a sort of emotional detective. You’re working with people who aren’t always able to tell you their needs. You have to be able to understand their needs as they are constantly shifting. What was really important to me, as much as we couldn’t really leave Ruth’s orbit and had to stay with her, was to show enough glimmers and interactions with Vanessa, Brian, and their colleagues to really understand the immense skill of their work. It was also to gain a sense of just how precarious this labor is for the people who do it.
To ground us in this moment, the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a budget bill that would enact the largest cuts to Medicaid in U.S. history. We tend to think of Medicare as the program that supports healthcare for older adults, but Medicaid is actually the main funder of home and nursing care for 17 million older adults in this country. 60% of nursing home residents, including those with Alzheimer’s and dementia, rely upon Medicaid.
This is a moment where our care infrastructure, which not only supports older adults but also supports the wages of care workers—which are already cruelly insufficient—is in peril of collapsing. Our hope is certainly that this film will help people understand the value of that labor. It’s the labor that makes all our lives possible, from birth until death.
Chalfant: And it’s not only the people we think of as skilled workers. One of the most potent scenes in the movie is the cooking scene in the kitchen. Those people who work as ancillary staff in these kinds of communities are also called upon to make nuanced choices, and they spend their lives making the lives of other people livable—and joyful, when they work.
It’s a film that shows the value of that labor, but also the experience of a woman outside of how productive she is in the working world. In both senses, though without leaving Ruth’s side, “Familiar Touch” invites dialogue about how insidious ageism is within contemporary culture and politics.
Friedland: In terms of your beautiful observation about ageism, one of the moments when I realized my own ageism as a young adult was when I was working as a care worker. I had this thought one day while working with one of my clients: “Old people are just like us.” [Both laugh] It was such a stupid, obvious observation, but ageism is so ingrained in our society that we see old people as other, rather than as us in a few years, if we are lucky. Some of the most moving moments of the festival circuit have been young people coming up to me and saying they identified with Ruth because, just like them as younger people, older adults have desires, whims, agency, and dreams. It’s so basic to say that, but I don’t think we have a cinema in America that shows us that experience of selfhood. I think we should all be anti-ageists.
Chalfant: We keep making this joke about our collaboration, which is that it’s a collaboration between a young filmmaker and an old actor. But we could talk to each other. There was never a moment when we couldn’t talk to each other or when we didn’t understand each other.
“Familiar Touch” opens in New York on June 20, expanding wider June 27, via Music Box Films.
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