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Director Sarah Friedland and Actor Kathleen Chalfant on ‘Familiar Touch,' Their Exquisite Portrait of ‘Coming of Old Age'
Writer-director Sarah Friedland remembers her grandmother, a poetry editor, as a 'badass lefty intellectual' who wielded language with precision. When she later developed dementia and became nonverbal, Friedland, then studying dance, was struck by her symphony of movements.
'She would rock and tap certain rhythms and was so physically expressive,' the filmmaker recalls—although by that point, her family had been speaking of her in the past tense. 'That gap between the person that we were describing as no longer there and the person who was very much still in front of me haunted me for many years.'
Friedland has drawn upon those experiences for her tender and heartrending debut feature, Familiar Touch. The film—which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, winning best debut, best director, and best actress in the Orizzonti section—explores dementia and identity through Ruth (the regal, luminous Kathleen Chalfant), an octogenarian former cook whose life gently unravels and reconfigures when she moves into assisted living.
Friedland calls it a 'coming of old age' film. 'I wanted to push back against that narrative of decline—the idea that older adults are diminishing,' she says. 'In the coming-of-age film, you see a character change, becoming a new or different version of themselves. There's this idea that our selfhood can shift and yet there's a continuity to it.'
Friedland references the 2013 book Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing and author Lynne Segal's idea of temporal vertigo: 'As we grow older, you can access all of the selves you've been up until that moment. And as such, they kind of mingle and create this sense of vertigo.' Chalfant illustrates this in the film with exquisite subtlety, assuming by turns the disposition of a coy flirt and a take-charge kitchen taskmaster.
A distinguished New York theater actor known for doing Angels in America on Broadway in 1994 and Wit off-Broadway in 1998, Chalfant was drawn to the role after her best friend, playwright Sybille Pearson, began to show signs of dementia seven years ago. 'At the time that I was given Familiar Touch to read, Sybille was in about the same place as Ruth,' Chalfant says. 'So the role was, in a way, a gift to Sybille, but even more, the character of Ruth was Sybille's gift to me. When I saw the movie for the first time, I realized how much of Sybille was on the screen.'
