Relative Control (2024), by Dafna Yachin
You probably know someone like Sara. Maybe you are like Sara. Sara (Teri Polo) is a workaholic and the kind of person who should be “employee of the month” every month. She dedicates her whole life to the firm where she works as a lawyer. But her life isn’t only working. She visits her elderly parents, Joe (Patrick F. McDade) and Kay (Alice Schaerer), once a week and constantly chats with her college-age son Eric (Ryan Saviano), who lives in another town. Since her son moved from his grandparents’ house, Sara became, because her sister Sissy lives far away in Florida, the sole caretaker of a couple of advanced age.
One night, Sara’s father falls from his new automated chair and injures himself badly. She convinces he and her mother to move to a retirement home. But, instead of things getting easier, her problems just get bigger and the cries for help more constant. This makes her stop taking care of her own health.
This is a true situation in which there are two sides to be considered. On one side, there is an older person, suffering with the loneliness of old age and the increased vulnerability that comes with it. On the other side, there is a caretaker that may feel like carrying a burden and making sacrifices to take care of the older person. Should all children take care of their parents when they get old, even the parents who weren’t there when the kids needed? This is not an easy question.
The retirement home environment reminded me of such a setting in the Netflix series “Grace and Frankie”. The duo formed by Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were briefly residents of such a place and, when living together in a beach house, still visit the retirement home to socialize with old friends. Places like these may be good to cure solitude, but there are other options as well: coming from another Jane Fonda movie, “All Together” (2011), we have the brilliant idea of having older friends live together in a vila, one taking care of the other.
Accessibility tools are useful not only for people with disabilities, but also for the elderly, who usually have an impaired mobility. Ramps and automatic doors — both lacking in a sequence of the movie that shows Sara taking Joe to a doctor’s appointment — are allies for a more inclusive and diverse world, that’s why we all should fight for and be vocal about accessibility.
Aside all these themes, we also have commentary on corporate bias when the subject is gender. Sara is the target of disapproval from a member of her firm’s board, Decker (Richard Lyntton), who even stalks her. A colleague opens up and reveals that Decker wanted his “new, young, trophy wife” doing what Sara does. I also kept waiting for Sara’s assistant Jake (Nicholas Delany) to be promoted only because he was a man, but once again Decker intervened and made him an offer in another firm that he couldn’t refuse.
There is room for satire as well. Sara’s father watches the news from a show called AmeriFlag — news for real Americans. Joe, a retired police officer, says he needs to stay current about subjects such as illegal immigration and criminality. It’s a clear satire of the many sensationalist TV shows that conquer the elderly and make their audience more conservative and bigoted. It’s a sign of our times.
Charlene Davis serves as both solo screenwriter and executive producer. It’s her first job as a screenwriter and third as producer. For Dafna Yachi, it’s her fourth time directing, as she has more experience producing.
More than a fine comedy, “Relative Control” shows us that we can’t be control freaks and must go with the flow. Life is all about embracing surprise — and we know that there are good and bad surprises on the way for everybody.
