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On the surface, Touch seems to be a sudden change of pace for Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, a quiet and polished film-of-the-book (in this case, the novel of the same name by fellow countryman Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson) that could easily pass for a BBC presentation. It does, however, square with his action-thriller output, being the story of a man on a mission; admittedly, nothing to do with savage lions (Beast, 2022), mountaineering (Everest, 2015) or Colombian drug cartels (Contraband, 2012), but older audiences will respond to its hero’s perilous journey into the past, risking Covid and the disapproval of his stepdaughter in his bid to solve a mystery that has haunted him for 50 years.
If it wasn’t for the subtitles, you’d swear this was a British movie from the early 2000s, following the Brit-lit conventions established along the way by the film adaptations of bestsellers such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement and On Chesil Beach, or Graham Swift’s Last Orders, or Julian Barnes’ Metroland. Together, they make up a kind of cinema of regret, and apart from Atonement, largely focus on men who find their lives almost over with one piece still missing.
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Here, that man is Kristofer (Egil Ólafsson), a recently widowed restaurateur still struggling to come to terms with his new life alone. Kristofer has some health issues, with urgent MRI results incoming, and to keep his mind alert he has a daily ritual that starts when he wakes up at 5.30 a.m., reciting his national insurance number, the day’s menu, and a Japanese haiku. This particular morning, however, is going to be different. Fishing out a box full of memories, Kristofer takes out some old notebooks and leaves his restaurant without opening it, instead putting a sign in the window suggesting it won’t be open again for quite some time. After apologizing to a photograph of his late wife, he drives to the airport and boards a plane for London, ignoring warnings of a deadly epidemic.
The year, then, is 2020, and Kristofer arrives in late March, just days prior to the global lockdown, where he checks into an impossibly snooty hotel. In flashback, we see how much life has changed for him: 50 years earlier, he is now an idealistic hippie (Pálmi Kormákur) studying at the London School of Economics. His friends want to change the world, and The Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” is the soundtrack to their revolution, discussed over pints of bitter in smoky pubs. Kristofer, however, is bored of their talk and drops out, taking a job as a dishwasher in Nippon, a Japanese restaurant — which would have been highly unusual for the time — run by Mr. Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki).
Mr. Takahashi takes a shine to Kristofer, and Kristofer takes a shine to Mr. Takahashi’s daughter Miko (Kôki Kimura). At first, Miko doesn’t reciprocate his feelings, and Kristofer is dismayed to discover that she has a Japanese boyfriend. Over time, however, the two become closer, and Miko finally falls for him after hearing him sing a traditional Icelandic song at a birthday party. Miko, though, is unwilling to tell her father this news, and the pair conduct their affair in secret. Visiting Miko at home, Kristofer starts to piece together her family’s story: Mr. Takahashi narrowly escaped death when the atomic bomb landed on Hiroshima in 1945, killing 100,000 people in nine seconds. Miko was born the same year, and her mother died shortly after from radiation sickness.
When Mr. Takahashi finally does cotton on, he reacts by closing the restaurant and returning to Japan, taking Miko with him. Kristofer is the last to know, and returns to Iceland, where he marries an old friend, adopts her daughter and tries to forget about Miko. But in the last leg of the movie, Kristofer is determined to find her again, jumping on another plane in a bid to find out what happened and arriving in Tokyo just as Japan is about to close its doors.
The strange thing is, Touch doesn’t really benefit much from its beat-the-lock Covid setting, since it doesn’t seem to stop the old man jumping from plane to train, and no one really seems to be socially distancing (even when they’re told they must). But there’s something charming about Kristofer’s persistence, and the two timeframes match surprisingly well thanks to some judicious editing. The sudden introduction of Hiroshima is a little heavy-handed, leading to a poignant denouement that was probably more sensitively handled in prose than it is on screen. But there’s a rapport between the younger cast that gives the older Kristofer’s quest a real sense of purpose: will he find her or not?
Kormákur’s film doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does have its little idiosyncrasies in a genre that can be very formulaic. Flashback films tend to lean on needle-drops to evoke period, but Touch uses them sparingly, notably with devastating use of Nick Drake. More bravura, however, is its use of Lee Hazlewood, the Serge Gainsbourg of Americana who lived out his end days in Sweden, of all places. In the older Kristofer, here’s more than a touch of Hazlewood’s 1966 opus “My Autumn’s Done Come,” a comic valediction that he wrote in his 30s. “Leave me alone, dammit,” it ends, “let me do as I please.”
Title: Touch
Distributor: Focus Features
Release date: July 12, 2024
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Screenwriters: Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, Baltasar Kormákur
Cast: Egil Ólafsson, Pálmi Kormákur, Kôki Kimura, Masahiro Motoki
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hr