Touch is a love story that covers continents and decades. It’s a sweet and heartwarming story, but slow moving and long. There are plenty of two hour movies out there that go by fast, but this one dragged. Nevertheless it was beautifully done and full of hope and love.
Touch, directed by Baltasar Kormákur, moves back in forth in time to reveal its secrets. I’ll summarize the story in chronological order.
In London, Young Kristófer (Palmi Kormákur), a university student from Iceland, quits school and gets a job as a dishwasher in a Japanese restaurant. It’s love at first sight between Kristófer and the restaurant owner’s daughter, Young Miko (Kôki).
Kristófer loves the people at the restaurant. He learns Japanese, he learns to cook. The owner loves him right back. Kristófer and Miko keep their love affair secret. Her father wouldn’t approve.
They close the restaurant for a few days of holiday. Miko and her dad never return. There was no goodbye, nothing. They just disappeared.
Some 50 years later, Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) is an old man living in Iceland. His health is going downhill. His daughter nags him to go to the doctor. The doctor advises him to take care of any outstanding business he has while he still can.
Kristófer’s most outstanding business is finding his one true love. The time is March 2020. He sets off for London just as COVID is shutting the world down. He spends a lot of time in London searching for clues as to where Miko might have gone.
He finally gets a clue that she may have returned to Japan. He flies out in a nearly empty plane to Hiroshima. The fact that Miko immigrated from Hiroshima is an important detail in the story but I won’t reveal why.
Kristófer must search for clues in Japan as well. It isn’t clear for a long time whether Miko is still alive and in Hiroshima.
The trailer reveals some spoilers. Here comes a huge spoiler: the elder Miko is played by Yôko Narahashi.
The beautiful and quiet film is a mix of Icelandic, Japanese, and English. Its message is that love endures and lasts over the decades. If you can deal with the glacial Icelandic manner of telling the story, it offers big rewards in the end. It’s streaming on Peacock.
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