An Icelandic/Japanese love story reaching across the decades in London and Japan, Touch is gorgeously romantic
“In situations like yours, people often use the opportunity to take care of unfinished business while they still can”
As close a Valentine’s recommendation as you’re going to get on here, 2024 Icelandic film Touch is a beautifully filmed and deeply romantic movie that deserved much more attention than it got. Written by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson and Baltasar Kormákur, from Ólafsson’s novel of the same name (Snerting in Icelandic), it does so much with a restrained amount of resources, proving that sometimes all you really need is just a love story.
Life as a student at the London School of Economics in the late 1960s isn’t necessarily suiting Kristófer, so he jumps at a chance discovery of a job opportunity as a dishwasher at a family-run Japanese restaurant, enchanted more by the restaurant owner’s daughter Miko than any great desire to enter the business. He’s soon caught in a world of culinary and cultural discovery though, bonding with everyone and eventually starting a secret love affair with Miko, who is adamant her family can’t find out.
But we almost start at the end, meeting Kristófer as an older man (Egill Ólafsson) who after receiving some news about his health, resolves to find Miko with whom he has lost touch. He flies to London in early 2020 to hunt the few clues he has left, but lockdown restrictions are starting to kick in to make things even harder. As flashback scenes take us through the slowburn of their emotional connection though, we begin to understand why he’s chasing this past love.
There’s something beautifully pure about Kormákur’s direction here, refreshingly uncynical as it both embraces the growing freedoms of the era but acknowledges the difficulties of the time too, particularly in the recent past for the Japanese. Palmi Kormákur’s young Kristófer is dreamily delightful and Kōki is a revelation as the forthright and curious Miko, gorgeous work comes too from Masahiro Motoki’s Takahashi-san, as both parent and parent-figure, Meg Kubota’s characterful colleague Hitomi and Ruth Sheen as a highly religious landlady.
