As far as I’m concerned, Lynn Shelton can do no wrong. There are plenty who disagree with this view after seeing Touchy Feely, but I’m not one of them; I found it a strong and deeply felt work that builds upon her prior projects and demonstrates her growth as a director. Her previous two films, Your Sister’s Sister and Humpday, were exceptional for the way they handled the complexities of human relationships both in broad scopes and in delicately handled and dramatized situations and scenes. Her newest film, though, finds her expressing her characters’ emotions visually in a way that I don’t remember in her other movies, and for small, character-driven films, this is a formidable skill and method of communicating thoughts and feelings without requiring characters to spell them out for the audience.
The scenes showing the Rosemarie DeWitt character’s perspective, using extreme closeups of skin, are really effective and tactile in portraying her relationship with her vocation as a massage therapist. The premise of the movie, at least the one I heard which I’m going to share but which you should immediately forget because it’s misleading/useless, is that she plays this massage therapist who develops an aversion to touch. The actual movie is far less dramatic that this description, and focuses on a small family, three members in particular, who each have their own social issues to deal with, and their relationship with the world and each other is sad and fascinating.
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