In "Keep the Change," New York City-based writer-director Rachel Israel expands an earlier short film. It's a sensitive but realistic portrait of a man and a woman dating along the autism spectrum in today's overpriced and socially challenging NYC, exploring their chances for fully realized lives, including a stab at romance. The 2017 Castro Theatre opening-night feature for the 37th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, "Change" plays the Roxie (Friday for a week) at a moment when Freddie Highmore's witty Golden Globe-nominated performance as an autistic surgeon on "The Good Doctor" has cast new light on a long-ignored minority.
The film gets off to a wobbly first act as we meet David (Brandon Polansky), a sarcastic, high-functioning young man, as he tries to sweet-talk the family chauffeur into letting him duck his mom's injunction that he join a weekly autistic support group. Up to now, David has met women through online dating sites. Invariably he fails to meet their expectations, and each encounter ends with him a little more humiliated.
At the autistic group, consisting of a dozen men and women drawn from Manhattan's Upper West Side, David's worst fears take shape in the person of Sarah (Samantha Elisofan), a young woman who is overly needy and a little too eager to join David for a class assignment to navigate the Brooklyn Bridge. Predictably, David (wearing sunglasses indoors) panics, bolting for the elevator with the tag-line "Have a good life." Later Sarah tracks him down, shaming him into completing their project on the bridge. It's here that they start to treat each other with a mix of affection and oddball disdain.
David and Sarah are perfect, at times almost cringe-inducingly so, as the autistic couple who try and fail repeatedly to establish a connection that fits their situation. While they have a powerful sexual chemistry, they are at odds on almost everything else. A highlight of their dating involves David blowing $900 on a high-end restaurant date that infuriates his parents.
To her credit, writer-director Israel doesn't pull her punches or make things easier for the non-autistic viewer. From the first scene, where David tries to con his chauffeur, to a near-meltdown final scene fumbling for exact bus change, Israel allows us to see David and Sarah as they see themselves, and as a liberal, Jewish, but still cruel community perceives them, as a, God forbid, possible married couple.
In the 1960s New York-based director Frank Perry tackled similar edgy romantic fictions in films like "David and Lisa" and "Last Summer," where two teen boys and a girl first embrace, then punish an odd girl trying to save an injured seagull on a Long Island beach. A half-century later, "Keep the Change" demonstrates how far we have and haven't come in accepting people with what can be, for "normal folks," vertigo-producing disabilities. A minor complaint: "Keep the Change" skirts but doesn't delve deeply into the subject of gay autistic men, leaving a meaty subject for some really brave filmmaker. Opens Friday.