The brilliant feature film Familiar Touch opens this week. Glam’s Tracey Korsten was lucky enough (after much juggling of four different time zones!) to grab an interview with director Sarah Friedland, star Kathleen Chalfant, and supporter, the indomitable Miriam Margolyes.
TK
Can I start by asking you Sarah, where the idea for this wonderful film came from?
SF
The kernel started with my paternal grandmother. She was a poetry editor and intellectual and someone whose sense of self was very much rooted in her linguistic expression. I would visit her at the assisted living facility where she spent the last few years of her life, [with dementia] and she was incredibly physically expressive. And that gap between the person we spoke about in absentia and the person who was very much present and alive, but just expressing herself in a very different way: that gap haunted me for many years.
Cut to a decade later, I started working as a care giver to older New York artists and creatives who had the earlier stages of dementia. And that job just really reshaped how I thought about ageing and age identity and the intimacy of care-giving. So the personal and the professional came together to inspire the film.
TK
And I believe you actually filmed in a real assisted living facility, using real residents?
SF
It became clear to me that if we were going to make an anti-ageist character study that the methods of making it had to match that ethos. One of the ways that ageism manifests is that…we see [the aged] as no longer talented or capacious and I think that is deeply untrue. So we spent five weeks teaching filmmaking to the residents at this retirement community. Then the residents made short films about their daily lives rotating roles. At the end the residents picked what department of the film they wanted to work on. And then the care staff became consultants on the film, and joined the cast as well. So we had this sort of artist-residency experiment in how we made it.
TK
And Kathleen. How did you become involved in this project?
KC
I was the last person to join the collaboration. Sarah had been working on the film for a long time with another person who became ill and wasn’t able to continue. Sarah does me the honour of saying that I was on the list but that I was too young! I had never played an 85-year-old Jewish woman before but I had played an 85-year-old Jewish man in Angels in America!
When I was asked to read the script I was deeply moved by it in part because my best friend, playwright Sibylle Pearson was in about the same place in her dementia journey as Ruth. So this was a way to pay tribute to Sibylle but much more important, it was Sibylle’s gift to me. I knew how to find Ruth because of Sibylle.
TK
And Miriam. Wonderful for you to be here with us today. What is your role in all of this?
MM
I’m not involved in any part of it unfortunately. I’m a friend of Kathy’s and I hope to be a friend of Sarah’s as well, but I don’t quite know why I’ve been asked to join such an august trio. I’m flattered and I’m old, so I’m relevant!
SF
I can clarify there. Miriam you were one of our first viewers when you saw the film in London a year ago and Kathy and I were thinking of interlocutors: of the artists who are thinking about women as they age, and that we’d want to be in conversation with. Both of us immediately said your name. So we think of you as a sort of thought partner.
TK
Miriam, what were your thoughts when you first saw the film?
MM
I was very moved and I also felt a kind of jealousy of Kathy who is just so remarkable as an actress. I just thought that’s the kind of performance that I hope that one day I give. And it’s her performance which moved me so much. And also the nurse. I felt there was a reality and a generosity about that performance which delighted me which you don’t often get. It bit into me. It’s lovely to be able to see older women doing something that matters.
TK
I was delighted to see H. Jon Benjamin’s wonderful performance as Ruth’s son. Usually known for this comedic voice work in shows such as Archer, how did his casting come about?
SF
It came about largely because our producer, Alexandra [Byer], is a big Bob’s Burgers Fan! She suggested him, I met up with him and he clearly understood the emotional experience of this character. One of the first things we discussed was the Oedipal discomfort of the opening scene.. A lot of middle-aged male actors wouldn’t want to go there, but he said that as a comedian it was his job to court discomfort.
KC
Jon was wonderful. He was generous in the way that the best actors are. Present, and so moving. There was a kind of immediate vulnerability. It was easy in the way that the best partnerships are.
TK
This is both a beautiful piece of filmmaking, and a talking point around ageism and sexism. Can you speak more about that?
SF
Part of why I wanted you Miriam in this conversation is that this film [can] change how we think about ageing and care labour and I feel that you have been so fearless in your activism around these things. I know politically there is much affinity between you and [us].
MM
My own personal experience [of dementia] was with my mother and it was the most terrifying and miserable and extraordinary and sad time of my life. And I will never recover from it. To see somebody lose themselves is an awful thing. I wasn’t brave when I was young. I left my father to deal with my mother. And then when he got poorly I made sure that he came to live with me. I just don’t think that we really know how to deal with ageing.
SF
Part of it is that we don’t care for the carers. If caregiving was perceived as a noble profession and compensated as such that would change how those care settings are run.
KC
Yes we ‘other’ people. And it happens in the most intimate relationships, such as carers and the cared for. The cared for often don’t themselves recognise the nobility of the work that is being done. There is a peculiar and unpleasant kind of classism engaged and if we could think of this work as noble then that might not happen and love and respect could reenter the discussion. One of the things that happens in the movie is that there is great respect by the carers for the cared for and vice versa.
TK
Do you think this work is mostly undervalued because it is seen as “woman’s work”?
SF
I think you’ve nailed it in terms of why that work is undervalued. I think it’s also undervalued because it’s racialized work. The majority of care workers outside the family are usually women of colour and often immigrants. I’ve heard from so many care workers that they are scared to show up to work because I.C.E. might come for them while they are caring for people. So it’s an intersection of gender, race, and immigration status.
TK
The film is also not afraid to embrace Ruth’s sensuality and even sexuality.
SF
I think one of the ways that we see ageism and sexism cross-contaminate in this terrible way is that older women’s sexuality is often the butt of a joke when it’s depicted on screen and Miriam it’s one of the things that I so admire about you about how you appear that you are not afraid to express and talk about your own sexuality.
TK
Kathleen the opening scene between you and Jon Benjamin was uncomfortable and yet rather beautiful. What did you have to bring to that as an actor?
KC
He was an attractive man and I was flirting with him! It was easy! As Miriam has so fiercely brought into the world, we’re old, but we’re not dead!! And Miriam I have to tell you a thing that will make you happy. The only country whose advertising campaign has dared to touch upon this was Italy. The Italian distributors made a series of posters and one of them said “Ruth. 85. Likes to flirt with her son.”
MM
I’ve just made a short film, which Kathy has seen, called A Friend of Dorothy, which has not the depth of [this film] but it’s something that people are beginning to talk about. They’re beginning to see the magnificence of old women. It’s the Edna O’Brien in us all!
SF
I echo the extraordinary capacity of older women and this film as a love letter to that.
Familiar Touch opens this Thursday.
More News
