Familiar Touch

Ruth Goldman (Broadway legend Kathleen Chalfant) has been living with dementia for some time, and the time has come to place her in an assisted living facility. But while this may seem like the end, for her it represents something like a new beginning in this poignant, Venice Film Festival-winning drama.FAMILIAR TOUCH is a coming of (old) age film. It follows an octogenarian woman’s transition to life in assisted living as she contends with her conflicting relationship to herself and her caregivers amidst her shifting memory, age identity, and desires.The film reimagines the coming of age genre to illuminate the experience of one older woman as she transitions into assisted living. It experiments with the markers of the genre to consider how we are all, always, coming of age. Narratives of older adults are peripheral in our culture, as if desire, dreams, and agency decay long before our bodies and minds do. As feminist scholar Lynne Segal writes, “as we age, changing year on year, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been, creating a type of temporal vertigo and rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age.” FAMLIAR TOUCH resides in that vertigo, as our protagonist Ruth not only disavows the roles expected of her – Mother, Patient, Old Lady – but her “appropriate” age identity, sliding between feeling 85 and 25. As an anti-ageist character study, the film locates its perspective not with family members who look upon Ruth, but with Ruth looking at herself. This is what differentiates the film from the flurry of recent dementia dramas: it refuses to situate its drama within the trope of the decline narrative.