The writer-director Sarah Friedland makes little mystery of her main character’s circumstances in the first few minutes of “Familiar Touch,” a plaintive triumph opening for a weeklong run at the Siskel Film Center.
In a sunny Los Angeles apartment, framed by visual compositions allowing the superb Kathleen Chalfant the time and space to simply be, the character, Ruth, is making brunch for two. Her visitor arrives, a middle-aged man looking concerned, a little wary.
Ruth is a couple of decades older than this man, Steve. We soon realize she does not know who Steve is, though earlier, when a piece of toast pops up from her toaster, she isn’t quite sure what to do with it, placing it on the dish rack. Ruth is dealing with dementia. This day, starting with these carefully made “signature sandwiches,” as Ruth calls them, is the day Steve, her son, played by with tact and subtlety by H. Jon Benjamin, will drive her and a single suitcase of her belongings, to the next part of her life.
The assisted living facility goes by the fragrant name Bella Vista, with a memory care unit nicknamed “Memory Lane” by the residents, as Ruth learns. Friedland, whose film won three prizes at last year’s Venice International Film Festival, filmed much of “Familiar Touch” in a Pasadena, California, continuing care retirement community, with the celebrated stage and screen veteran Chalfant working closely with its residents.
Without exposition dumps or pressurized contrivance, Friedland reveals facets of Ruth’s life, scene by scene, in the 85 minutes of screen time. Memories of Ruth’s past float in and out of her present-tense existence. At one point, floating in the community pool, Ruth, her eyes closed, imagines a long-ago day at the beach, indicated by distant sounds of children playing and a fragment of a Coney Island carousel melody. A Flatbush Avenue native of Brooklyn, she’s lost in reverie, and like all the shifting sands of orientation and disorientation shaping her world now, the memory comes. And goes.
Cognizance of her surroundings, and the people in her life (Carolyn Michelle is very fine as residency staffer Vanessa), is fluid, not solid. There’s a lovely mixture of orientation and disorientation at work in the scene where Ruth walks into the residency kitchen (she was a cook in her earlier years), ready to chop, eyeing the half-assembled fruit salad. An empathetic staffer does the best possible thing: He lets her work, asks her questions about food and life. Lunch that day turns out to be a little special.
Freidland has no stomach for overt heartwarming or screw-tightening drama, though plenty happens. Matching wits with a residency doctor, or somewhat witheringly calling out a fellow resident for wearing a chip clip in her hair, Ruth comes to dimensional life, thanks to Chalfant. Having seen her in the world premiere of Margaret Edson’s “Wit” 30 years ago, delineating a very different character (a John Donne scholar) striking the best bargain she can with fast-moving cancer, it’s a privilege to witness what Chalfant achieves with this character, in these distinct circumstances, never pushing, always illuminating.
Friedland gets just a tad cute on us, near the end, in a Valentine’s Day reunion of mother and son. Yet even that feels earned. The filmmaker’s careful, just-so visual approach in “Familiar Touch” allows for the space and the time for Ruth to regard where she is, who she is, who she was. In interviews Friedland has cited an array of international influences (including one of my favorites of the 21st century, Lee Chang Dong’s “Poetry”) on her thinking. The result is an auspicious first feature, and I’d see it if I were you.
How to watch: June 27 to July 3 at the Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org
