“Touch” Review: Secret Flirting in a Japanese Kitchen

After a comfortable career alternating between Hollywood films set in far-flung places (Beasts, Adrift) and films set in his native Iceland, director Baltasar Kormakur returns to his native Iceland with the bittersweet love story Touch, which once again hops continents within its two-hour runtime.

There's a sense of restlessness woven into the story, which adapts Olaf Johan Olafsson's novel and centers around a widow's attempts to solve the mystery of her past through memories of a love affair. Anchored by some captivating performances and Kormákur's sure, intuitive storytelling, it's a fascinating shift for a filmmaker who tends to lean toward high-adrenaline survival tales.

Veteran Icelandic actor and singer Egil Ólafsson stars as Kristopher, who begins the film closing up his Reykjavik restaurant, leaving his home (saying “forgive me” to a photo of what is presumably his deceased wife) and catching a flight to London. Radio snippets and masked workers reveal the start of the pandemic, and we see Kristopher doing memory exercises, suggesting he's in the early stages of dementia. But the more pressing unknown that drives Kristopher is what happened to the woman he fell in love with while working as a dishwasher in a Japanese restaurant during his university days in England.

Egil Olafsson in the film “Touch.”

(Balthazar Brekki Thumper/Focus Features)

Set in vibrant '60s London, we're introduced to the director's shaggy-haired, skinny son, young Christopher, played by Palmi with no acting experience, and his kind-eyed co-worker Miko (the shining Kouki), the daughter of the restaurant's hardworking owner, Takahashi-san (Motoki Masahiro). Thanks to cinematographer Bernstein Bjorgulfsson's warm, inviting cinematography and set designer Sneva Asa Weichappel's detailed, lived-in restaurant set, it quickly becomes clear that this flashback is the film's central storyline, a comforting haven for a makeshift immigrant family.

Soon a master-disciple relationship develops between the restaurant's alternately strict and gregarious owner and the unlikely new employee, who has dropped out of school to immerse himself in Japanese culture, from learning the Japanese language to cooking and writing haiku. At the same time, a closeness develops between the two young people as they exchange secret messages beneath the roof of the thriving restaurant. But Miko, who speaks English, has reasons for hiding her passion from her guarded father, who still grapples with the real trauma of life in Japan, having survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

In the end, as the past comes to a predictably tragic end and the possibilities of the present take priority, an older Christopher, played with masterful understatement by Ólafsson, travels to Hiroshima where all is revealed about a romance cruelly cut short 50 years ago. But it's also when the weight of historical event ultimately thwarts what could have been a quietly fascinating story of strong-willed people from vastly different backgrounds bonding in a foreign land. Miko's connection to the atomic bombing is handled delicately, especially given how the pandemic affects the final scene (featuring a moving performance from Narahashi Yoko, the film's casting director), but it also feels shoehorned in as a plot device.

But even after the historical tragedy has darkened, there's still much to admire about Touch as a love story, especially the way Kormákur cares for his actors. His action-movie background hides the fact that he also loves what can happen in small spaces with a look, a word, a gesture. He sees human sparks everywhere, and the consistency of his tenderness is a fitting approach for a tender film about older people clinging to the memories of those feelings for decades and yearning to give them life once more.