Gentle and beguiling, Touch is a change of gear for director Baltasar Kormákur, the Icelander who made his name with a series of genre movies, like the homegrown thriller 101 Reykjavík, before heading to Hollywood where 2 Guns (with Denzel Washington) and Everest (Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley) showed he could handle big stars and big productions.
That’s all dialled back here in a very human and quiet drama about a lone, ageing Icelander who, towards the end of his life and with a wife now dead, tries to find the young woman he fell in love with 50 years before.
Kormákur chops between the eras. In the here and now Kristófer a grizzled bear of a man flying from Iceland to London and eventually on to Japan, held at arm’s length from the world by the Covid outbreak. And in the past, in the London of the late 1960s, there is the young Kristófer, a handsome, long-haired strip of a lad who, in a stab at solidarity with the proletariat (or maybe just to distance himself from his awful fellow Icelanders), gives up his studies at the London School of Economics and takes a job as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant.
There, between filling sinks with sudsy water, he gets to know proud, sweet and beautiful Miko (model Kōki). In an extended tease Kormákur plays will they/won’t they with this relationship while repeatedly taking us back to the future, where Kristófer is searching for the same Miko, now with 50 more years on the clock.
A ruminative companion piece to last year’s Past Lives, or 2022’s Living, with Bill Nighy, though Kormakúr puts his own stamp on similar ideas by lavishing attention on the look and feel of the film. The scenes set in late 1960s London are particularly well done, a depiction of a world that’s familiar and yet distant. In fact distance – time, space, human relations – is the prevailing mood, with Covid working as a natural metaphor for this, as it does for cultural separations.
The performances are universally low key, and though Palmi Kormákur (the director’s son) gets the bulk of the camera’s attention as the young, lanky but soulful Kristófer – a test he passes – Egill Ólafsson as the older Kristófer also impresses in a tricky role as the questing detective.
What’s also really notable is how well side characters are fleshed out – the receptionist at the London hotel where old Kristófer arrives just as the first Covid lockdown is about to bite, a nothing role but played just right by Kieran Buckeridge. Or Miko’s father (Masahiro Motoki), who teaches young Kristófer about the haiku, and is an interesting mix of disapproving patriarch and free spirit.
Everything is evocative without being insistent. At one point old Kristófer gets a tattoo in what used to be the restaurant where he worked decades before but is now an ink studio – it’s not overdone. Music choices – the Zombies, the Plastic Ono Band, Lee Hazlewood – just drift into the ear, setting the scene rather than stealing the show.
The spell is slightly broken in the final section, where the mystery, the quest, finally resolves in “all this is a spoiler” scenes I cannot go into. A lot of talk, much explaining, some resolutions, though not all is completely hashed out.
An Eat Pray Love for guys? A touch maybe. A man in search of his past and his soul(mate), this is Iceland’s entry for the Oscar for best international feature in 2025. Given that Past Lives got nothing last year, who knows?
Touch – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
