“Familiar Touch” Is an Exquisitely Fragmentary Portrait of Memory Loss

All of us have our distinct cinematic strain factors, particular sorts of photos that set off a burst of squeamishness. I instinctively cowl my eyes every time I see a personality chopping meals in haste, which frequently portends a painful slip of the knife. Within the quietly wrenching new film “Acquainted Contact,” Ruth Goldman (Kathleen Chalfant), a lady in her eighties who has dementia, exhibits off some skillful, unhurried, fortunately accident-free knife work, trimming recent dill for sandwiches in a single scene, and slicing grapefruit for a fruit salad in one other. I tensed up anyway, briefly fearing that the movie’s director and screenwriter, Sarah Friedland, would seize on these moments to emphasise Ruth’s vulnerability, her lack of psychological acuity or bodily management. Fortunately, no. Friedland isn’t a sadist, and Ruth is a retired cook dinner, with a lifetime’s value of culinary mastery that doesn’t yield simply to the erosions of age. Amid so many fast-fading recollections, meals gives a uncommon and sustaining foothold.Ruth prepares these sandwiches, early on, for herself and her son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin). By this level, she has forgotten that his identify is Steve, that he’s her son, and that she even has a son. Steve’s unhappy, stoic expression means that he has grown used to being handled as a stranger. This lunch is the final meal they’ll share collectively in Ruth’s home, in Los Angeles. After they end consuming, Steve drives her to Bella Vista, an upscale assisted-living facility that, as he gently reminds her, she picked out a while in the past. Ruth’s responses to those (for her) shocking developments appear to obscure as a lot as they reveal: Are we catching glimpses of the lady she as soon as was, or of a lady she as soon as dreamed of turning into? Considering that Steve is taking her on a date, she responds with a little bit of wink-wink ribaldry that makes him briefly uncomfortable. When he lastly shatters the spell and calls her “Mother,” she not solely denies being his mom but in addition insists that she by no means needed kids. Vaguely greedy—and maybe resenting—that she is being moved into a brand new house, she purses her lips, avoids eye contact, and tells Steve to get going: “I would really like you to be unconcerned,” she says, with a steely resolve that appears to come up from deep inside. Right here, we sense, is a lady accustomed to, and now being disadvantaged of, her self-sufficiency.What does Ruth know, and when does she realize it? That is the query that hums away beneath each scene of “Acquainted Contact,” and it infuses the serene, fine-grained surfaces of Chalfant’s efficiency with a unprecedented factor of thriller. A easy expression of puzzlement takes on layers of attainable that means; a confused frown can struggle a figuring out smile to a draw. Adjusting to life at Bella Vista, Ruth will be snappish, however she is fast to mood her irritability with kindness. She can be extremely adaptable: when an authorized nursing assistant, Vanessa (splendidly performed by Carolyn Michelle), slyly cajoles her into taking her treatment, Ruth relents with a heat and playfulness of her personal. At instances, she appears to treat her new state of affairs, rightly, as an journey, with ample room for exploration and function play, and he or she throws herself into it with a lucidity that appears, for now, to overpower her confusion. Within the movie’s most pleasant sequence, Ruth, spying a chance to be helpful, strides into the kitchen throughout breakfast prep, dons an apron, and insists on doing a shift. The employees, although stunned, kindly accommodate her, with what appears like practiced readiness. Right here and elsewhere, the movie turns into as a lot a portrait of on a regular basis life at Bella Vista as it’s of Ruth herself.Friedland underscores this by frequently situating Ruth inside giant teams, filmed in stationary lengthy photographs by the cinematographer Gabe C. Elder. At instances, it takes some time to search out her, ready at a desk within the eating room, or sitting with different residents throughout a leisure exercise that includes virtual-reality headsets. “Acquainted Contact” was shot at Villa Gardens, a retirement neighborhood in Pasadena, and conceived in shut collaboration with the middle’s residents and care staff, a few of whom seem as background gamers. (In accordance with the movie’s manufacturing notes, residents additionally participated in varied behind-the-scenes roles, together with manufacturing design, casting, and camerawork.) It’s becoming, then, that what passes onscreen between Ruth and her caregivers is a wry spirit of collaborative improvisation, as if the characters themselves have been participating in an appearing train. Throughout an interplay with the house’s pleasant director of well being and wellness, a person named Brian (Andy McQueen), Ruth murmurs, knowingly, “I have to play the affected person, and also you play the physician.” The giving and receiving of care is proven to be enriched, on each side, by flexibility, creativity, humor, and a measure of make-believe.For all these intimate grey zones, “Acquainted Contact” is, unambiguously, a portrait of decline—a course of that the story tracks, partly, by way of Ruth’s rising battle with banal on a regular basis actions. Early on, she’s at house, rifling by way of a closet for one thing to put on—a search that consciously evokes the inside workings of reminiscence—and ultimately dressing herself, elegantly and with no obvious issue. Later, at Bella Vista, Vanessa, who has come to treat Ruth with daughterly affection, has to assist extricate her from a tightly buttoned prime. By the top, Ruth sits quietly in her room, ready as one other employee gently pulls a shirt over her head. The employee is sporting a face masks, the primary one we’ve seen, which grimly means that the pandemic is below method—and leaves us to marvel, with little optimism, what is going to change into of Ruth and her fellow-residents within the horrible months forward.So why endure this film? Definitely not for novelty’s sake; we’re hardly starved for dramas of psychological decay, or for the stupendous feats of appearing which can be usually achieved of their service. However “Acquainted Contact,” its title maybe a tacit acknowledgment of how well-worn this terrain is, illuminates its protagonist’s situation with unusual concision and charm, and with few of the formal and narrative methods we’ve come to count on. Not like, say, “Away from Her” (2007) or “Nonetheless Alice” (2014), Friedland’s film doesn’t lean too closely on a member of the family’s helpless gaze; Steve is a sympathetic however peripheral presence, and Ruth’s journey stays a painfully solitary one. And in contrast to “The Father” (2020), essentially the most outstanding and lauded of current movies on this vein, “Acquainted Contact” doesn’t make use of the syntax of a thriller as a way to strand us within the labyrinth of a affected person’s broken, distorted consciousness. Friedland, working in a spare, disciplined fashion, has set herself a trickier problem: she seeks to convey Ruth’s psychological interiority by way of rigorously exterior means.She additionally pictures her characters’ palms with explicit care and attentiveness. It’s clear from the title and the start of the movie—when Ruth opens her palm expectantly, ready for Steve to seize her hand—that human contact will probably be a resonant motif. As verbal dialog turns into more and more difficult, the feeling of a reassuring hand on Ruth’s again—or the texture of a swim coach’s arms, gently supporting her within the water—might talk extra profoundly than phrases can. If the movie has a tragic turning level, it’s a silent, fantastically sombre second during which Ruth, seated in an examination room, gently touches her palms to her chest, as if attempting to simulate another person’s contact—and cling, for only a second longer, to a different fast-fading reminiscence. No marvel the style and the tactility of meals proceed to imply a lot to her; no marvel she steals out one night time for the easy pleasure of a grocery run, and the texture of recent produce in her palms.As “Acquainted Contact” proceeds, it appears to empty out: of dialog, of characters, and even of absolutely fashioned scenes. The enhancing, by Aacharee (Ohm) Ungsriwong, takes an elliptical flip, as if Ruth’s thoughts and reminiscence have been now not able to registering various fragments at a time. We really feel, in her stiffening posture and hollowed-out gaze, a lady’s incremental, helpless withdrawal from the world round her, and it’s devastating to behold. However devastation is just the end result, and never the whole lot, of Ruth’s journey, and Chalfant’s efficiency, for all its beautiful subtlety, can be furiously alive. Over the course of the film, Ruth’s cognitive limitations give rise to a dynamic vary of emotional expression: when she bosses folks across the kitchen at Bella Vista, or regales Brian mid-examination with an unsolicited recipe for borscht, you see a lady in open, even exuberant defiance of the top that she is aware of awaits her. This can be a uncommon main movie function for Chalfant, a veteran actor greatest identified for her theatre work, and it instills, amongst different issues, a strong need to see her in additional—and to search out, after Friedland, one other filmmaker whose sensitivity of contact matches her personal. ♦