email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

LES ARCS 2024

Review: Touch

by 

- In this cross-continental romantic drama, Baltasar Kormákur shows a gentler touch than he’s typically known for

Review: Touch
Egill Ólafsson in Touch

Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson – who wrote the novel that Touch was based on and co-adapted the screenplay – has enjoyed a prize-winning career as a novelist, yet his biography’s most intriguing detail is his role in creating the PlayStation gaming console whilst an executive at Sony. The movie is a nested narrative linking the island countries of Iceland, the UK and Japan, and lead character Kristopher’s gradual obsession with the latter nation seems to reflect Òlafsson’s eclectic career journey, as well as the international co-operation (in spite of the Cold War) that began to emerge in the later 20th century. Never too challenging, yet often engaging and lightly eccentric, this era-spanning romance from prolific Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur was selected as his country’s International Oscar entrant, and had an acclaimed worldwide release through Focus Features following its quiet premiere at the Sydney Film Festival. It is currently showing at Les Arcs.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)
focusfeatures_conclave_Internal_Cathy

Kormákur has previously made tough-guy Hollywood action-dramas like Everest [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
film profile
]
and 2 Guns, but he changes pace here with something aimed at an older and maybe undemanding audience, its proverbial temperature never rising above freshly brewed, milky tea. Yet this tale of an Icelandic university dropout whose passion shifts from communism to fine cuisine, who then experiences a fleeting affair with his Japanese restaurant colleague, has a laudable, plain-spoken address whilst also revelling in the wide-angle, pictorial beauty that’s second nature to Kormákur. Non-linearly interspersing its 1960s-set passages with the just-passed COVID-19 era, it also recalls Paris, Texas, but with about 40% of its potency.

The literary narrative structure from its source material is not concealed here, and thus we’re taken into the consciousness and memories of Kristopher (Egill Ólafsson), a distinguished, greying Icelander probably not unlike Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson himself, a widower looking to settle his affairs after he receives a diagnosis of dementia. His determination and unfiltered feelings, as he realises the preciousness of his current phase of life, actually help make him a fun and unpredictable protagonist to follow: soon, he is airborne to London in March of 2020, unbothered by the virus’s threat to his age cohort and the city’s population worriedly preparing for lockdown.

With his out-loud, verbal repetitions of recipes and haikus in the opening scenes providing a poignant foreshadowing (and also keeping his memory nimble and healthy), his unlikely journey from the London School of Economics to the back kitchens of a Japanese restaurant in Soho is recalled in flashback (where he’s played ably by Pálmi Kormákur, the director’s son), as he falls for the beautiful Miko (Kôki), their affair complicated by her father (and his boss) Takahashi’s (Masahiro Motoki) total and old-fashioned veto over her serious suitors.

These scenes proceed very slowly, savouring the period atmosphere and the characters’ chemistry as if it were a smoke ring woozily exhaled from a joint, which the era-appropriate music of The Zombies and Nick Drake, and the film’s likening of Kristopher and Miko to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, also encourages. But then Kormákur ups the pacing and diminishes the believability as Kristopher’s desire to seek what became of his love takes him to Tokyo as the world opens up post-vaccine, and all of our queries and some dawning and traumatic political relevance are fully explained. First, Touch feels almost conflict-free, then we’re suddenly forced to process a barrage of exposition, including key narrative connections to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that awkwardly deploy the tragedy for narrative catharsis, yet finally concentrate the overall power of the film’s unique storytelling: that of a life enriched by tender touches, granted by Kristopher’s worldly attitude, then yearned for once they’re mysteriously withheld.

Touch is a production by the UK, Iceland and the USA, staged by Good Chaos, RVK Studios and Focus Features. The latter is also the worldwide distributor.

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy