Touch: Memories of a Lost Love Play Out At Their Own Sweet, Icelandic Pace

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B

In the film promotion world, trailers get a bad rap for misrepresenting a two-plus hour film in 30 seconds. But try doing it in a couple of words.

Touch, the globetrotting, heartfelt drama by Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur is summarized by various press releases, as well as the blurbs on sites like imdb and Rotten Tomatoes, as “romantic and thrilling.”

It definitely is romantic. But thrilling is the last adjective I would think to apply. People with cardiac conditions can rest assured that this amiable then-and-now tale – taken from a novel by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson (who also co-scripted) – will not test their resting heart rates, even during the tasteful sex scenes.

Kōki and Pálmi Kormákur find love in a Japanese kitchen

Which doesn’t preclude other adjectives, including sweet, charming, melancholy and richly characterized. Touch is a film that moves at its own Icelandic pace to savour its own tragic, but ultimately hopeful story.

The short synopsis is that it is about an elderly Icelandic restaurateur named Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) who is facing his own mortality, closes his shop and leaves. Between concerned calls from his adult daughter, Kristófer also receives phonecalls from his doctor’s office requesting that they “talk about your MRI results.”

He blows off these calls as he’s leaving the country, as he checks into a hotel that is on the verge of closing because of the 2020 pandemic, and as he travels throughout the film. While he can, Kristofer is searching for something (or someone) from his past, a symbol of lifelong regret.

Two movies in one, Touch then takes us to London in the early ‘70s, when a bearded and baby-faced Kristófer (Palmi Kormákur, the director’s son) is enrolled at the London School of Economics. There, amid era-setting soundtrack songs by The Zombies and Nick Drake, he hangs at pubs with fellow Icelandic expats and new British friends, making plans to change the world through socialist (or maybe anarchist) revolution.

In for more a pound than a penny, he ultimately rejects the school and decides to join the proletariat – talking his way into a job as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant.

Whatever his personal Cultural Revolution is meant to accomplish, it all goes out the window on his first shared glance with Miko (the actress/songwriter Kôki). Miko, the daughter of the restaurant owner Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki), works as a waitress, but constantly tests her traditionalist father’s patience by indulging in London nightlife.

For his part, Takahashi is impressed by the young gaijin Kristófer’s determination and by their shared love of fishing. The mentor soon becomes a father-figure, and dish-washing makes way for cooking lessons.

But it’s the blooming love affair between Kristófer and Miko that is the heart of the film. Of the two movies that comprise Touch, the part that is young and alive is clearly more entertaining than the part that is old and regretful.

There is a past to Takahashi’s decision to start a new life with his daughter a half a world away from their previous home in Hiroshima. It is the unseen cloud that hovers over Kristófer and Miko, and it is the hard secret that awaits at the end of the elder Kristófer’s appointment with his remorseful past.

Perhaps it has something to do with the author co-scripting the film, but Touch almost seems too faithful to its source material – a specious observation you might think, considering it’s a book I haven’t read. But something happens to the storytelling after the elder Kristófer reaches Japan. But for a scene with a new friend and many drunken shouts of “Kampai!,” what awaits us is a last act loaded with awkward exposition.

Exposition in a novel is forgiven, since the reader dramatizes the words mentally. In a film, exposition is simply exposition. It’s like waving a narrative white flag.

And it strikes an off-key final note to a slight, but warmly tragic love story.

Touch. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur. Written by Kormákur and Ólafur JóhannÓlafsson. Stars Egill Ólafsson, Pálmi Kormákur, Kōki and Masahiro Motoki. Opens in theatres Friday, July 12.