TOUCHY FEELY written and directed by Lynn Shelton, with Rosemarie DeWitt, Josh Pais, Ellen Page and Scoot McNairy. A VSC release. 88 minutes. Opens Friday (October 11). For venues and times, see listings.
Lynn Shelton makes movies about uncomfortable people. And just as Humpday and Your Sister’s Sister examined friendships and romances confused by sexual orientation and missed connections, her new film, Touchy Feely, finds the members of a Seattle family struggling with emotional limitations and inexplicable body issues.
“It turns out I’m a one-trick pony,” she laughs over the phone from Washington state.
“I’m drawn again and again to relationships between people who really, really want to connect and just can’t get out of their own way to do it. All we really want in life is to connect to other human beings, and when you desperately want to connect physically to one specific human being and you can’t? That’s something I find compelling.”
Touchy Feely reunites Shelton with Rosemarie DeWitt, who co-starred in Your Sister’s Sister. Here, she plays a masseuse whose entire life is sent spinning out of control when she develops an aversion to physical contact.
“Skin is really freaky when you get right down to it,” Shelton says. “It seemed feasible that somebody who works intimately that way with skin might just reach a threshold and not be able to touch one more body. That was the starting point.”
Shelton pitched DeWitt on the idea when she was editing Your Sister’s Sister.
“She basically said ,‘I’ll do whatever you write for me,’ which was great,” the filmmaker says. “And then she became this muse. I was able to flesh out what was going to happen to this character with her in my mind’s eye.”
Also essential to Shelton’s process: long, digressive phone conversations with her actors about their characters’ history.
“It’s really all about creating a sense of intimacy and trust with the actors, getting that sense of who they are and being comfortable with each other, so when we get on set together they’re gonna be at ease.
“For instance, I got on the phone a lot with Josh Pais and Ellen Page” – who play father and daughter in the film – “to talk about their shared history and the backstory of their characters so they could get a sense of each other’s cadences and just kind of get comfortable, but I never talked to Scoot McNairy and Josh at the same time, because those two characters were not supposed to be comfortable with each other.”
That discomfort is essential to Touchy Feely, and to Shelton’s approach to drama in general. She tells stories about the messiness of emotion, and how people inevitably wind up splattered with it.
“I naturally get led there,” says Shelton. “My mom was in education, and I remember reading in one of her books about multiple intelligences – this whole theory about how there are all these different ways you can be intelligent, like eight or 10 of them or something. And one of them is emotional.
“I always thought, ‘Well, I may not be smart on some of these other scales, but I would agree with that description.’ That’s where it lies for me.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision