“Touch,” from Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, is vast in scope, stretching over decades, languages, continents, and cultures, with themes of memory, aging, loss, and love. But its sensibility is as exquisitely tender as the flutter of a butterfly wing.
Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) is an elderly widower and restaurant owner in Iceland who visits his doctor to talk about some diminishing of his memory and fine motor skills. The doctor orders an MRI and gently suggests that this might be a time for Kristófer to consider any unfinished business or any unresolved issues he may wish to address while he still can. This brings on a flood of memories of Kristófer’s first love when he dropped out of graduate school in London and went to work in a Japanese restaurant. He decides to go to London to see if he can find her 60 years later. This is all happening in March of 2020 when the world is shutting down in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his daughter makes increasingly worried and frustrated phone calls, but Kristófer does not have time to wait.
As he travels and investigates, we travel back and forth in time between the present and the past to see the young Kristófer (Palmi Kormákur) and Miko (Yôko Narahashi) in 1960s London. Cinematographer Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson captures these memories in soft, warm colors that contrast with the cooler palette of the present day.
Kristófer, frustrated with his studies and participation in student protests, impulsively responds to a help-wanted sign on the door of a Japanese restaurant owned by Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki). That is where he first sees Miko, Takahashi-san’s daughter. After a conversation about Kristófer’s work on a fishing boat off the coast of Iceland, Takahashi-san hires him as a dishwasher. Luscious food, prepared with care and artistry, appears throughout the story, and a meal that Kristófer prepares for Miko is as dreamily romantic and thrillingly sensual as the scenes of them in bed together.
The young couple talk about John Lennon and Yoko Ono holding a Vietnam War protest “bed-in,” which places it in 1969. Kristófer talks about it as a political act, staging a protest in a five-star hotel. But Miko sees it as opening up possibilities for cross-cultural romance in an era when the memory of WII was still very present for all countries involved. When Kristófer’s school friends come to the Japanese restaurant, they joke about kamikazes. And Miko has a tragic personal connection to the devastation of the war.
In present-day London , Kristófer is able to track down one of the other employees of the restaurant, who tells him that Miko is now in Japan. As masks, hand sanitizers, canceled flights, and temperature checks appear around him, and as we learn more about the past, Kristófer continues to look with a sense of purpose but also with an appreciation of the world around him. In one scene, a Japanese “salary man” (office worker) sits next to him at a restaurant counter. They have a frank, alcohol-fueled conversation filled with warmth and good fellowship and end up doing karaoke together.
