Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland, 2024).
Heartbreaking as it so often is, there is something almost subversively uplifting about Familiar Touch (2024). Sarah Friedland’s feature debut centers on Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), an octogenarian struggling with dementia as she transitions to life in a retirement home. But where so many other old-age dramas would couch her story as an inexorable, humiliating decline, Friedland’s takes a more daring approach. No harbinger of decay, Ruth’s condition here stands as a rebirth of sorts; as her cognitive skills atrophy, her other senses are suddenly kindled anew, until the texture of the film itself seems to adjust to its protagonist’s worldview. True to its title, Familiar Touch is a profoundly tactile experience, which is to say it’s told by and large through the movements of Ruth’s body. This is nothing entirely new for Friedland, a filmmaker attuned to dance whose trilogy of shorts, Movement Exercises (2017–22), traces choreographies of quotidian activities practiced across domestic, work, and educational spaces. Like those earlier projects, Familiar Touch is more concerned with physical than verbal language, dissecting the ways in which dementia forces Ruth to renegotiate her social role (Patient? Child? Mother?) and everyday gestures in a world that is slipping away from her.
Just as refreshingly, the film steers clear of cheap sentimentality. As written by Friedland and brought to life by Chalfant, Ruth is not a patient waiting to fade away but a woman who still retains and exercises her agency and desires—another departure from films where older adults are routinely framed as passive and sexless peripheral figures. Humorous interludes and surreal flourishes pave Ruth’s journey; filmed by Gabe Elder in static shots, Familiar Touch shows a keen eye for the absurdity inherent to Ruth’s predicament and life in retirement communities in general. That was the one thing the residents of the active facility in Pasadena where Friedland’s film was shot demanded: that Familiar Touch would not shy away from the moments of levity so integral to everyone’s experience of the place. That’s another choice that sets the film apart from other dramas of its ilk. But what’s most astonishing about Friedland’s first feature is the way it depicts Ruth’s aging as a kind of sedimentation. Even as our looks change, year on year, we still carry traces of our past lives with us, and Friedland knows that it only takes a familiar smell, sound, or—yes—touch to collapse time and open up a portal through which Ruth can commune with all her previous selves. As her grip on reality loosens, her sense of self broadens, and part of the magic of Familiar Touch is to watch Chalfant dance between different Ruths in the same scene; her performance—all the more extraordinary for just how effortless it feels—is the source of the film’s power.
I met Friedland and Chalfant last year at the Venice Film Festival, where Familiar Touch screened in the Orizzonti sidebar, to discuss its corporeal focus, the collaborative way they crafted Ruth, and how the film puts us in her perspective—and in her body. The festival had just reached its midway mark; a few days later, Friedland and Chalfant would be called back to the Lido to pick up three statuettes: the Orizzonti award for Best Director and Best Actress, as well as the coveted Best First Feature prize—a deserved triumph for one of the year’s most auspicious debuts.
Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Familiar Touch doesn’t treat aging as a disintegration, but a kind of awakening: As your cognitive faculties deteriorate, other senses are heightened. There’s something electrifying about that paradigm shift.
SARAH FRIEDLAND: Thank you for saying that. I wanted to find a language for Ruth’s coming-of-age story that would be rooted in her body, a language that would highlight this intensification of her senses and push back against this idea of decline. My background is in dance films, and I wanted to use their gestural language to show Ruth making sense of herself and the world through her body rather than through her cognition and language only. I think that’s true not just for people with memory loss, but for all of us: We make sense of the world through all of our senses, not just cognition. That was very much inspired by my grandmother’s own experience with aging and memory loss. I also served as a caregiver for a few years, and I remember many of my clients being so present, disinhibited, expressive, and creative. They were experiencing some form of loss, it’s true, but that loss didn’t define their identity; the narratives around them framed them as declining. And the coming-of-age genre served as a sort of scaffolding—a means to think of Ruth’s life in terms of continuity rather than disintegration.
NOTEBOOK: Familiar Touch is often extremely moving, but it’s never sentimental; that too strikes me as a stark departure from other old-age dramas.
KATHLEEN CHALFANT: Well, one of the features of short-term memory is that you live in the moment, and that’s the thing actors are always being told to do. And it takes forever to understand what people are talking about, let alone really feel it. What that means is that wherever you are is the only thing that’s real to you. But it is entirely real. I didn’t live in any tragic notion of Ruth’s life; if anything, I had a utilitarian understanding of it. Once she realizes that she’s stuck in this retirement home, she must figure out how to live there. And only slowly does she begin to find the joys of it. Plus, Ruth is a big trickster, and the biggest trick she tries to pull is to outwit this thing that’s happening to her. They always say that when you suffer from memory loss music is among the last things to go. But one of the last things Ruth might lose—if she ever does—are her knife skills! As she says, she’s a cook, not a chef: a person who’s lived her entire life in a sensory world.
FRIEDLAND: Tonally, I think that emphasis on sensation might be part of what you’re responding to. Another crucial thing that we spoke lots about was Ruth’s sexuality. One of the most infantilizing and dangerous elements of ageism is that we assume that older adults are no longer sexual beings. While sexuality, in fact, follows us from birth until death. Finding a language for Ruth’s bodily experience of sexuality, as well as her other senses was key to show her curiosity, but also her agency. This is something I noticed with many of my clients, that our desire to feel autonomy, to feel agency, is universal; even if one needs care, it can still be expressed. I had one client, for instance, for whom picking out an outfit every day was very important. That was how she expressed her autonomy. I had another for whom writing down her grocery list was paramount. I wanted to show Ruth in a way that would express her agency through these details, and I also wanted to play with her age identity. That’s something that we connected about, as well. Our age identity—not just for older adults, but for all of us—is so much more fluid than we say it is. As a thirtysomething, I can still access parts of my childhood self, my teenage self, and so on. So to couch Ruth’s experience not as a precipitous drop but a kind of time travel, not via flashbacks but through a convergence of all her prior selves—that’s how we veered away from tragedy.
CHALFANT: It’s the upside of disinhibition. We all, one way or another, behave as we think we’re meant to. And one of the silver linings of disinhibition is that you don’t have those standards anymore.
Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Part of what makes Familiar Touch so effective is its parsimoniousness. You only gradually introduce us to Ruth, and for every little clue you reveal I had a feeling there were plenty you deliberately kept hidden. Could you speak about that restraint?
FRIEDLAND: That’s because I wanted the viewer to experience time as Ruth does. As Kathy was saying, this experience of living in the present moment is true for all folks with memory loss. Which meant that everything had to be accumulated through Ruth’s gestures and tasks. I never wanted the viewer to glean information beyond what they could register from these small, little moments. And I’m really interested in building characters through their movements, their gestures. I know there isn’t much plot to the film, but the script’s earliest drafts had even less of it. Originally, the idea was just to look at Ruth as she moved around her home of many decades, and then follow her as she settled in a completely new space. At one point I wrote down a list of all the gestures in the film, all the moments of touch. I was really trying to craft the script physically, before any idea of plotting took over. That’s how Ruth experiences herself and the world—through her senses. We too had to come to know her that way.
NOTEBOOK: How collaborative was the character-building process, then? I’d love to hear more about how you crafted Ruth together, and just how much room you left for improvisation on set.
FRIEDLAND: I mean, I’d be curious to hear Kathy’s thoughts on this. I feel it was a very collaborative process. In all honesty, I came in thinking there might be even more room for improvisation, but one of the things I love about Kathy is that she’s so precise with language. So I feel that our collaboration on set had much more to do with that malleable age identity and what she could do with it. There are clues in the script, of course, but one of the great joys for me was getting to see Kathy surprise me with which Ruth she would show up as, or which Ruths she would intertwine in any given scene. One of the extraordinary aspects of the whole process was feeling completely trusted by Kathy, and mentored by her, too. To move from working with nonprofessional actors and dancers to an actor as talented as Kathy was extraordinary. I was very nervous, at first, but discussing movements and gestures and blocking together became a sort of shared language to find Ruth. We didn’t always have to psychologize. We talked about emotions, yes, but we would often come up with ideas just by talking about movement. It was a wonderful and wonderfully playful experience.
CHALFANT: It definitely was. The thing about movie acting is that, to do it successfully, you have to trust the person who’s seeing you behind the camera. I work a lot in theater, and in theater, everyone on stage is responsible for the whole thing. Whereas in movies, if no one films it, it didn’t happen. Bear in mind that of all the people who worked on [Familiar Touch] I was the very last to join, so Sarah and everyone else knew more about Ruth than I did. And from the very first day I knew that I could trust Sarah; that if I did what she said, it would work. We had a beautifully and elegantly thought-out structure, and a shot list for every scene. And any opportunity we had to improvise we took. Take the scene where Ruth’s given a minute to come up with as many words as possible starting with the letter “f.” The only direction there was to put at least one word starting with “ph” and avoid getting to “fuck” for a while. I think we did five takes for that scene? You know, I saw the movie for the first time just yesterday…
NOTEBOOK: What did you think?
CHALFANT: I liked it. And I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to watch it because I don’t usually like to look at myself on the screen. But I had completely forgotten about that scene, the “f” words exercise, and it made me laugh. I had learned a great deal about Ruth from my best friend, who at the time was grappling with dementia herself. And very quickly after the movie started I saw my friend on the screen, and I hadn’t realized how much of her I’d internalized. That’s what made it possible for me to see the movie, take myself out of it entirely, and honor Sarah’s work. After all, the actors provide the furniture, but it’s the director and the editor who arrange the room.
Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Can we talk about the role of humor in the film? Immune to sudsy moments as it may be, Familiar Touch remains a devastating watch—yet you offset that with plenty of levity and humorous details.
FRIEDLAND: As far as depictions of aging go, I think there are two poles I would consider problematic. On the one hand, there’s the decline narrative of tragedy and decrepitude. And on the other hand, there’s a patronizing and infantilizing tendency to frame older adults as either fabulous or so cute. I find both of these poles equally problematic for different reasons. At the same time, humor is an inescapable part of life, and there’s so much absurdity in aging communities. What I’ve found from working in these spaces is that the laughter doesn’t just come from younger people laughing at older adults; there’s plenty of absurdity that is shared between the older adults themselves. They participate in the laughter. And that participation, to me, is what shifts the meaning of laughter. This is something the residents of the gardens we were collaborating with all said when I pitched the film to them. The residents’ council and the staff had to consent to being part of the film, and the residents had us promise that there would be humor in the film, ’cause it was such a key part of their lives. That’s how I wanted to approach the moments of humor: as a collective experience of absurdity rather than Ruth or her peers ever being the butt of the joke.
NOTEBOOK: I for one never felt as though I was laughing at, but with them. Which made the film so much more powerful and, yes, uplifting.
CHALFANT: I’m so glad to hear you say that. And it was wonderful to hear so many people laugh during the premiere the other day, because I fear people don’t laugh anymore. Certainly not at a movie about old people—unless they’re those stereotypically cute caricatures.
Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: What about your decisions concerning the film’s looks? Familiar Touch traffics in static shots, and there were moments when its warm palette made it seem as if Ruth’s stay unfolded in a single, uninterrupted summer afternoon.
FRIEDLAND: I’ve been very fortunate to work with the same cinematographer, Gabe Elder, and production designer, Stephanie Osin Cohen, for almost nine years now. We’ve made multiple shorts and video installations together; we really developed a shared visual language. What you’re responding to is very much the three of us together. As for the warmth, something I wondered once my grandmother moved into a memory care unit in California was how she might experience time when every day was sunny. What clues did she have to orient herself temporally? Part of why we shot in California was to have that sort of disorientation of the California climate. And I think the warmth speaks to this broader idea of wanting to attune to Ruth’s senses and sense-making, and find a palette where the camera’s visual desire matched her own sensory desire. As for the shots, I love static frames because movement that you might not register as choreographic is heightened. I’ve been making films where those choreographies are not dancerly, exactly, but of the everyday. And I think static frames really allow these patterns of non-virtuosic movement to become visible as choreography. That was one component.
There were also the sheer limitations of working in a real-life retirement community. We couldn’t lay any dolly track, for one thing, because it would have been a physical hazard for the older adults living there. So we had to make sure the cinematography would be nimble, and that meant shooting on a tripod, mainly. I didn’t want the camera to feel too embodied; it really needed to remain proximate and intimate to Ruth’s own body. There are only a few instances of camera movements, like the very last shot, where the camera slowly tracks in and moves closer to Ruth. That movement, for me, emulates the perspective of the whole film. While most movies with older adults would have them recede into the background, this does the opposite. It starts with Ruth having almost receded into the background of a space we assume is depressing and then moves closer and closer to her, until we finally see all the micro-gestures of her extraordinary performance. That last tracking shot represents the perspective shift we wanted to make with [Familiar Touch]. But it’s a rare moment, because we really needed Ruth's body to determine what was animate in the film.
Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Save for one or two diegetic songs, Familiar Touch has no music to speak of, which isn’t to say it is quiet. In fact, the film’s soundscapes and the disparate noises they refract all seem to work to rekindle Ruth’s senses and reveal new layers of her character.
FRIEDLAND: Well, I wanted people to hear the world as Ruth might. She’s moved to a place where sounds are quite distinct from those she might have heard at home. And there might be some symphonies created by her heightened attunement to sound. One of the things that tend to happen with older adults in general is that many of them experience a sort of collapsing of close and distant sound. There’s an immense sonic experience that occurs with age, and it’s different for every person. But in the mix, we really wanted to think about these fluctuations of sonic scales—what was close and what was distant—and to locate a kind of surrealism in that intensification. The film’s surrealism, after all, doesn’t come from a break from reality, but from this intensified sensory experience in the present moment. We had to stay close to Ruth’s experience and to Ruth’s body, and music just felt like it would be overlaying something that wasn’t emerging from her. It would have been prescriptive, and manipulative.
We worked with a wonderful sound designer, Eli Cohn, and together we made a list of all the sounds that Ruth used to hear in her home of many decades and all those she would hear in her new place. And to draft that list I sent a survey to all the residents we worked with, and asked them to name the sounds that they noticed the most in the facility. The main thing many of them listed was the sound of an ambulance, and what that might indicate about their peers living there. The other was the sound of the labor of those who worked there—the people maintaining the building, the carers, the visitors. To me, these sounds are half the film; after all, Ruth’s transition to this new place is a sonic transition, too.
CHALFANT: And for someone who used to live alone, by choice, arguably the most shocking thing about Ruth’s move is that she’s suddenly surrounded by human voices. Which is a profoundly disorienting experience. It was something I couldn’t register while acting, as all those sounds were added in post. But it was wonderfully done, and it really does capture what it feels like to come into a new place, when you hear things you might have never heard before, or things suddenly sound closer, or anomalous. There’s a scene when all you hear is the sound of a bird…
FRIEDLAND: For the record, my twin sister’s boyfriend is a birder, and he made me a precise list of all the birds one can hear in Pasadena. And then we sent them to our sound designer—so the birds you hear are all “correct.” And I drove to some canyons around Los Angeles to do some field recordings so that the soundscapes of the natural environment around Ruth’s home would not only be more or less precise to that location in California, but also distinct from the more urban soundscapes of the facility. We got quite precise! [Laughs.]
NOTEBOOK: Will you be showing the film to the residents you worked with?
FRIEDLAND: Definitely. We haven’t figured out where our LA premiere will be, but they’ve been with us throughout this whole process, and we kept in touch during post, too. The minute the Venice press conference was over, the day the lineups were announced, we had our own press conference on Zoom to share the news with all the residents. And the running joke was that they all could come because Venice is just south of Santa Monica; they could just take the bus. There were talks of a transnational gondola. Jokes aside, there’s so much talent in that community, both among the residents and the staff, and they’re all eagerly awaiting the LA premiere so they can help organize the screenings. And we’re very excited for the collaboration to continue.