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Chicago Tribune
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Familiar Touch' review: A coming-of-old-age story, compassionate and clear-eyed
The writer-director Sarah Friedland makes little mystery of her main character's circumstances in the first few minutes of 'Familiar Touch,' a plaintive triumph opening for a weeklong run at the Siskel Film Center. In a sunny Los Angeles apartment, framed by visual compositions allowing the superb Kathleen Chalfant the time and space to simply be, the character, Ruth, is making brunch for two. Her visitor arrives, a middle-aged man looking concerned, a little wary. Ruth is a couple of decades older than this man, Steve. We soon realize she does not know who Steve is, though earlier, when a piece of toast pops up from her toaster, she isn't quite sure what to do with it, placing it on the dish rack. Ruth is dealing with dementia. This day, starting with these carefully made 'signature sandwiches,' as Ruth calls them, is the day Steve, her son, played by with tact and subtlety by H. Jon Benjamin, will drive her and a single suitcase of her belongings, to the next part of her life. The assisted living facility goes by the fragrant name Bella Vista, with a memory care unit nicknamed 'Memory Lane' by the residents, as Ruth learns. Friedland, whose film won three prizes at last year's Venice International Film Festival, filmed much of 'Familiar Touch' in a Pasadena, California, continuing care retirement community, with the celebrated stage and screen veteran Chalfant working closely with its residents. Without exposition dumps or pressurized contrivance, Friedland reveals facets of Ruth's life, scene by scene, in the 85 minutes of screen time. Memories of Ruth's past float in and out of her present-tense existence. At one point, floating in the community pool, Ruth, her eyes closed, imagines a long-ago day at the beach, indicated by distant sounds of children playing and a fragment of a Coney Island carousel melody. A Flatbush Avenue native of Brooklyn, she's lost in reverie, and like all the shifting sands of orientation and disorientation shaping her world now, the memory comes. And goes. Cognizance of her surroundings, and the people in her life (Carolyn Michelle is very fine as residency staffer Vanessa), is fluid, not solid. There's a lovely mixture of orientation and disorientation at work in the scene where Ruth walks into the residency kitchen (she was a cook in her earlier years), ready to chop, eyeing the half-assembled fruit salad. An empathetic staffer does the best possible thing: He lets her work, asks her questions about food and life. Lunch that day turns out to be a little special. Freidland has no stomach for overt heartwarming or screw-tightening drama, though plenty happens. Matching wits with a residency doctor, or somewhat witheringly calling out a fellow resident for wearing a chip clip in her hair, Ruth comes to dimensional life, thanks to Chalfant. Having seen her in the world premiere of Margaret Edson's 'Wit' 30 years ago, delineating a very different character (a John Donne scholar) striking the best bargain she can with fast-moving cancer, it's a privilege to witness what Chalfant achieves with this character, in these distinct circumstances, never pushing, always illuminating. Friedland gets just a tad cute on us, near the end, in a Valentine's Day reunion of mother and son. Yet even that feels earned. The filmmaker's careful, just-so visual approach in 'Familiar Touch' allows for the space and the time for Ruth to regard where she is, who she is, who she was. In interviews Friedland has cited an array of international influences (including one of my favorites of the 21st century, Lee Chang Dong's 'Poetry') on her thinking. The result is an auspicious first feature, and I'd see it if I were you. 'Familiar Touch' — 3.5 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (brief strong language) Running time: 1:30 How to watch: June 27 to July 3 at the Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.;
Chicago Tribune
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘A Photographic Memory' review: A beautiful search for a long-lost parent, in words and pictures
Unusual in the pre-digital age, before rampant cellphone camera chronicles of everyone's lives changed our visual landscape forever. This is what photographer and filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed remembers of her childhood in 'A Photographic Memory,' a supple nonfiction triumph with a weeklong run at the Siskel Film Center. Seed's film pieces together an idea of a vanished loved one, from inchoate fragments of loss unique to those who never really knew a parent. The filmmaker's mother, Sheila Turner Seed, was a remarkable, adventurous spirit and an accomplished global photographer, writer, interviewer and Albany Park native. She died suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in 1979. She was 42. Daughter Rachel was 18 months old. There were photographs, of course, many taken by Seed's father, British photographer Brian Seed, who sold stock images featuring young Rachel as a frequent camera subject. She was just an everygirl in those photos, at a birthday party, or playing with friends on the sidewalk, or twirling around the house. It was, as director, co-writer and co-editor Seed says in 'A Photographic Memory,' a false front of normalcy. In 2008, well into adulthood, Seed discovered a stash of reel-to-reel audiotapes — hours and hours of interviews her mother conducted in the early 1970s with 10 celebrated photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson. This was a complicated emotional lifeline: the sound of her mother's voice, at long last. Seed, who followed her parents' career paths as a photographer, also discovered a trove of her mother's own photographs, revealing a distinctive, clear-eyed aesthetic and a nomadic itch. Turner Seed, as one of her friends and colleagues interviewed for 'A Photographic Memory' phrases it, wasn't a workaholic, exactly. She was a 'lifeaholic,' living, traveling, striving for the fullest possible existence. Her recorded conversations with Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and others, and daughter Seed's own interviews decades later with many of the same people, become a beguiling whole in 'A Photographic Memory.' Turner Seed's interviews served as the basis for the popular eight-part audiovisual educational project 'Images of Man.' From this wellspring, Seed's documentary took shape, though it took a full 16 years to come to fruition. The delicately woven final version, made with co-writer and lead editor Christopher Stoudt, devotes precisely the right amount of screen time to Seed's own perspective and life circumstances. It's a movie about how we remember, and how photographs and audio recordings can answer questions, though never fully, and always open to interpretation. There are, however, remnants of Turner Seed's life that her daughter shares with us in this film that are wonderfully direct. Some are ordinary journal entries that turn out to be succinctly extraordinary in their brevity. At one point, teenage Turner Seed wrote in her journal: 'Mom told me I should marry him. How can she play with my life that way?' Without playing with anyone's life, 'A Photographic Memory' makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries. No MPA rating (brief partial nudity) Running time: 1:25 How to watch: June 20-26, Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed will introduce and discuss 'A Photographic Memory' at several screenings, details at
Chicago Tribune
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Going high or low? Film festivals ‘Summer Camp' and ‘Bleak Week' open on Sunday
Right now at the movies, Tom Cruise, a Hawaiian island dweller and a genetic lab experiment from space are simultaneously agitating and reassuring millions with tales of apocalypse-thwarting derring-do ('Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning') and a loving family in challenging circumstances ('Lilo & Stitch'). It's good news for theater owners, and the perpetually challenged moviegoing tradition. This is good news, too: We have a couple of eccentric film festivals opening this week in Chicago, designed to broaden our options and reexamine some movies past, launching the new month in this nervous breakdown of a year with some striking emotional/visual extremes, careening from darkness to giddy intensity in multiple genres. 'Summer Camp' is what the Siskel Film Center calls its 10-film mini-festival of 'extra-ness,' that adjective courtesy of director of programming Rebecca Fons. The series opens at 1:30 p.m., June 1 with 'Written on the Wind,' director Douglas Sirk's feverish Texas hotbed of repression and psychosexual yearning. A huge hit in 1956, coming off Sirk's previous examples of brilliantly skeptical romantic artifice, this is a melodrama that turns 'mambo' into a verb. Oscar winner Dorothy Malone, as the rabidly carnal oil heiress, not just figuratively but literally mambos her disapproving father into a fatal heart attack. It's a great scene in a dozen ripe, contradictory ways. And that, for many, exemplifies the power of camp in the right filmmakers' hands. From there, the festival struts from a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford smackdown ('Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?' from 1962, directed by Robert Aldrich) to John Waters ('Female Trouble,' 1974, with Divine, of course) to a clever variety of titles ranging from 1933's 'King Kong' and '42nd Street' to the uniquely unhinged 'Boom!' from 1968 and director Joseph Losey. 'Boom!' may star Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but the real star, in my view, is the Tiziani label of Rome, whose wardrobe for Taylor is the stuff of waking nightmares. The range of work on screen in 'Summer Camp,' Fons hopes, supports the notion that camp has no fixed definition, only an appetite for life. She says she revisited Susan Sontag's 1964 essay 'Notes on Camp,' which she first devoured in college, for curation tips and as a historical sounding board for her own ideas about cinematic extra-ness. 'I'm always thinking about how movie audiences interact with what's in front of them,' she says. 'For me, camp means a celebration of self, of the extravagance of self. It can be expressed through fashion or just the outward expression of pure emotion, with no shame.' Though it predates the Victorian era by centuries, 'camp' as we now know it, though its definition remains an argument every time, has its roots in the queer Victorian usage of the word. (There's a really good feature on this posted on the United Kingdom National Archive website.) In her essay, Sontag consciously downplayed camp's political and queer aspects, and its sly revolt against the establishment. Its gradual mainstreaming meant something; it was serious business, in the spirit of outré flamboyance. She defined camp as 'playful, anti-serious,' expressing a fundamentally comic or ironic worldview and 'artifice as an ideal.' Also starting June 1, 'Bleak Week' at the Music Box Theatre takes things down a notch, while somehow taking it up, too. The festival moniker comes from the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, which has presented 'Bleak Week' in a big, bittersweet way for four years running. This year, several other art-house and repertory film organizations around the country are getting in on the downbeat, among them the Paris Theater in New York City and the Music Box in Chicago. The 12-film series took a couple of titles from the American Cinematheque's past calendars, while programming the rest with the Cinematheque's blessing. The result is a vivid, surprisingly varied range of bummers, both domestic and foreign, many of them exquisite in their stoic but not heartless dramatizations of a world out to get you, somehow, with forces of doom snaking through the narratives. Some are Hollywood studio classics of the 1970s, such as director Roman Polanski's 'Chinatown' (1974) or, lesser-known but extraordinarily affecting, Jerry Schatzberg's plaintive road movie 'Scarecrow' (1973), pairing Gene Hackman with Al Pacino in a simple story of drifters with an idea to open a car wash. Simple idea, complex and remarkable performance detail: The film was shot in sequence, allowing Hackman and Pacino, actors and recently anointed stars, the time and rhythm to accommodate, however warily, each other's working methods. It wasn't a hit, but 'Scarecrow' knew the score. The late Hackman frequently cited it as his most gratifying film experience. Despair can be really funny, too, and the Coen brothers' 'A Serious Man' (2009) piles misfortune atop misfortune for a University of Minnesota mathematics professor (Michael Stuhlbarg), cuckolding him (Fred Melamed's Sy Abelman is the most soothing bastard in modern American cinema) and eventually forcing him into a stern ethical dilemma around grading time, among other catastrophes. It's the Coens' best film, and yes, I'm not forgetting 'No Country for Old Men,' the one everybody admires more because serial killer movies are easier than mordant comedies of unease. 'Bleak Week' spans the globe, with the infamously grotty late-night dare 'In a Glass Cage' (1986) from Spain's Agusti Villaronga and, from Japan, Akihiro Suzuki's newly restored 1999 sexual odyssey 'Looking for an Angel.' Greece's Yorgos Lanthimos and his black-comic penchant for totalitarian nightmares are represented by 'Dogtooth' (2009). The rest of the offerings fill out the slate's idea of what bleak means to this director, and that one, and why despair comes in more than one shade of grey. The Music Box has big expansion plans, recently announced, thanks to a $1.2 million community development grant from the City of Chicago. The Southport Avenue landmark is adding a 100-seat theater to complement its existing 700-seat auditorium and the 60-seater built a few years ago, located across from the concession counter. The third theater will replace two storefront units immediately south of the Music Box main entrance. Managing director Ryan Oestreich says it'll be a $2.6 million project overall, as the theater renovates its restrooms to double the capacity. Target completion date is summer 2026. 'We're future-proofing ourselves,' he says, 'because our audience is growing. The new screen will allow us to better juggle the two sides of our programming, the repertory side and the new releases.' 'Bleak Week,' he says, is 'an experiment. But if you play the same hand over and over again, does that help the cinema experience in Chicago? It does not.'
