Familiar Touch

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Sarah Friedland has a debut outing which is affecting while being understated. “A Familiar Touch” is the first of its kind: a sort of coming-of-age film for the senior set, if one can imagine such. By employing pointed, brief and reflective scenes that are completely without sap or sentiment, the miraculous thing is that one can.

Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) is an octogenarian with dementia about to go with her son (H. Jon Benjamin) to a nursing home. Ruth does not fret or moan and generally takes everything as a matter of course and then realizes something new. When she becomes confused or affronted Ruth usually transforms the experience into a new situation. 

In turn, Ruth’s middle-aged son is not awkward or condescending, but kind and matter of fact.

Even though Ruth has a health challenge, her personality and spirit remains intact. She is neither a zombie nor dysfunctional but rather a person simply living with a situation of dementia.

The nurse Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle Smith) does not treat Ruth like a number but a person and a feeling soul. Ruth is never condescended to or looked down upon. One sees Ruth as one sees Vanessa. Both of them are holistic, full bodied and organic.

In other films, older people and comprised patients are treated with suffering, melodrama, or danger. But here, the absence of handwringing or saccharine emotion is refreshing and is to be commended. 

Ruth confronts all head on with a sense of wistfulness and wonder. Voyeuristic, objective camerawork with the emphasis on the textures and colors of things, allows the audience to discover Ruth as both a capsule of vast experiences and a new being, living and breathing in a fluorescent and contained environment.

This film is a spiritual haiku, pointing at what it might be like to be a double minded person: on one hand Ruth is a storehouse of struggles and joy, but on the other she is a young fledgling explorer tasting the synthetic borscht of life in a new living space.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com