(courtesy IMP Awards)
There is an aching beauty and hopefulness to Touch that very quickly digs down into your soul.
In this exquisitely soulful and thoughtful film, directed by Baltasar Kormákur to a screenplay by Kormákur and Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson (who wrote the book on which it’s based), themes of regret and roads not taken are balanced quite movingly with the tenacious idea that it is never too late to see what might have been, and we come face-to-face with the optimistic idea that even when life is nearing its end, or at least one in which you are a consciously active participant, there’s still a chance to take the other sliding door.
As Touch opens, the film’s protagonist Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson as an older man in 2020; Palmi Kormakur as a young uni student in the late 1960s) has received some lifechanging news from his doctor, and seized by a sense of impending mortality, if not of his body, then his mind, the restaurateur decides to close his successful Japanese restaurant in Iceland and head off to find the woman he fell in love some 50 years earlier.
Young Kristófer is an avowed anarchist, who fed up with his studies at the London School of Economics, decides on a whim in front of his friends to quit his degree and take up a position as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant run by Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki).
It’s an impulsive act even for him, and one guided, we find out later, by the fact that he meets and near-instantly falls in love with his eventual boss’s daughter Miko (Yoko Narahashi) on the day he goes in to apply for the job.
He sticks at the job not simply because he likes Miko – at the time she has a boyfriend, and getting together with her romantically isn’t an option, anyway) – but because he is adopted in a way by Takahashi-san and staff like the lovely Hitomo (Meg Kubota) who fold him this gai-jin (foreigner) into this small but perfectly-formed found family.
Kristófer learns Japanese and how to cook many of the dishes the restaurant serves, and as he grows closer to his future vocation and to the Takahashi family, he discovers that the reason they are in London is because, as survivors of the nuclear bomb blast in Hiroshima (known, also with Nagasaki survivors, in Japan as Hibakusha), they faced far too much discrimination back home.
London was chosen, wryly notes Takahashi-san one day, because it was furthest he could go on he cheapest flight, and while he has found a home in the UK capital, he is never entirely at home, especially when it comes to the fate and welfare of Miko who is far too Westernised for the chef’s comfort.
Remarkably though he dotes on Kristófer, and whatever issues he may have with his conflicted past, they do not impinge on the close fatherly relationship he develops with the polite, diffident young man who comes to be the most unusual and valued person the restaurant employs.
(courtesy IMP Awards)
Quite what happens to Kristófer and Miko, and why it is they are entirely set apart some 50 years later must be left to the languidly impactful loveliness of Touch and it’s gorgeously affecting narrative, but suffice to say, that what happens in that small ex-bakery restaurant in London comes to define him for the rest of his life.
When he is given the diagnosis by his doctor, he of course faces a fairly grave choice – simply tidy things up as they are and await the diminution of his life as his mental faculties slowly decline, or stride out and bravely seize what might have been.
Kristófer does the latter and without giving much of anything away his journey, told in flashbacks to the late 1960s and 2020 scenes tinged by impending pandemic and the loss of connectivity we know it brings, comes to beautifully and effectively speak to the regrets we all have and how we have a choice just like Kristófer – consign them to the dustbin of history or bring them back to the fore and hope that this time reality embraces hope and bright promise, and doesn’t spurn them.
On the surface at least, the story is quite melancholic with Kristófer facing substantial loss of agency and cognition, but Touch does so magnificently is inject hope into what any reasonable metric would seem to be a hopeless situation.
It’s the fact that Kristófer refuses to succumb to any shred of hopefulness that captures your heart and holds your attention through every perfectly rendered and thoughtful frame in his wonderfully ruminative film.
He should give up this flight of fancy, says his daughter and hotel staff in London, all of them concerned not simply that he’s on what appears to be a romantic goose chase but by the fact that, with serious health issues looming, he faces being stuck in a country he doesn’t know for the duration of the pandemic.
But such practicalities are pushed to one side by Kristófer who is impelled to track down Miko, to find out what his life could have been and to live life LARGE one last and critically important time.
His unwillingness to simply shrug off the compelling stark realities of life that are encircling him is quietly inspiring, and you come to see Kristófer very quickly not a silly, stubborn old man as some people in his life do, as a brave and beautiful soul who wants to carpe diem life one last time while he is still able.
Touch is by any measure a cinematic gem, a heartbreakingly and yet uplifting story of what happens when life doesn’t deliver on all its early promise and hope, and yet how, even though life has served up a perfectly reasonably time of it, you reach one last time for that brass ring and hope, with a mix of tenacity and touching wishfulness, that this time life will come through and your heart will not discover what might have been but what is very much here and now.