In the opening scene of Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, a man (H. Jon Benjamin) goes to visit his mother (Kathleen Chalfant) for lunch at her house. We don’t at first know this is the dynamic between them, but we can assume from the context. We don’t know it because she doesn’t know it, so him mentioning it would be quite awkward. He doesn’t eat any of the lunch, but we aren’t sure if that’s because he’s got too many nerves in his stomach about the thing he must do, or if it’s because she can’t be trusted to make food anymore. After all, she did just put a piece of toast in the dish rack. For her part, she shows no anxiety at all, but thinks she might be on a date, at one point putting her hand on the thigh of the man to whom she gave birth.

In this way, Familiar Touch begins its journey of telling one particular story about the millions of humans currently suffering memory loss. The thing the son, Steve, must do is bring his mother, Ruth, to a retirement home, where she will live out the rest of her days in the memory care unit. It’s a retirement home she selected herself when she was more compos mentis. Just as she’s ignorant to the reality of so many other things in her life, she leaves her home without knowing where they’re going on their “date” – she gets him to agree reluctantly that it’s “a surprise” – and certainly without knowing she’ll never set foot in that home again.

We do learn that Ruth can likely be trusted with food, as a complex recipe for borscht is one of the many things she has not forgotten, along with her exact address growing up in Brooklyn, some three quarters of a century earlier. (We later learn she’s actually written a cookbook.) And to be sure, people with Alzheimer’s or dementia do not have the problem of remembering nothing. However, she believes her husband is still alive and that her son might be a potential romantic partner — to say nothing of how this would entail cheating on that husband — and that’s a problem.

Familiar Touch proceeds to show us the small ways Ruth adapts, or fails to adapt, to her new surroundings, and it has the unique production of having been shot in an actual functioning retirement community, Villa Gardens in Pasadena, California, with actual residents in background roles. Don’t worry, no elders were harmed during filming. More than a proper plot, the film presents a series of vignettes about how its main character both learns the ropes in her new home and keeps herself at a distance. She’s torn between twin notions of wanting to return to her previous home and wanting to adopt the workers at the facility as actual friends, both natural instincts, and neither particularly productive for her situation.

The remarkable thing about Friedland’s film, her feature debut as both a writer and director, is that any time the film seems like it could be heading for some big statement or operatic turn of events, she pulls back on the reins. This scenario lends itself to characters giving belaboured exposition to their feelings of disorientation, opportunities for elevated forms of tragedy. Friedland resists these and keeps the film grounded in specific choices.

One example is the scene where Steve leaves his mother, an event that occurs fairly quickly — probably for advisable reasons, like pulling off a bandage. But it’s also because Ruth wants him to leave, having suddenly had to compute that she’s not actually his date, and quickly assemble whatever sort of orientation she can. She does this with a line of dialogue a person wouldn’t have written unless they’d had real experience with this sort of malady, which Friedland has. “I want you to be unconcerned,” Ruth says in a sharp voice to her son, that word both being a rare choice in any sort of conversation, and a perfectly inexact way of telling someone not to worry about you, the sort you would choose if your mind weren’t working properly, in a tone of voice that leaves room for nothing but concern.

Of course this is Chalfant’s film, and she’s exquisitely cast. The actress is eight years younger than the character is supposed to be – she lists her DOB to prove she still has all her faculties – but she’s allowed herself to look older in a way that eschews vanity. The shortness and thinness of her hair suggests someone undergoing chemotherapy, though I think it’s also meant to be an indication of her inability to properly assess her own grooming, as she still spends time picking out outfits and fussing in the mirror over her appearance. Chalfant has perfected this look of annoyed distraction, like there’s something bothering her but she can’t put her finger on what. It’s a far more human-sized version of what we know are tectonic shifts in the human personality, but rarely present in ways that would be their cinematic equivalent.

There’s a quiet part you don’t want to say out loud with dementia. Other characters tiptoe around ever saying “YOU HAVE MEMORY LOSS” because the idea is to keep the loved one in as close to blissful ignorance as you can manage, while still making them aware why they’re here, and that it is a permanent change in their circumstances. Familiar Touch says this quiet part brilliantly, with a metaphorical loudness that makes it an urgent viewing for anyone who is going through this scenario with a loved one – and then for everyone else as well.

 

Familiar Touch opens tomorrow in cinemas.