“Those sweet memories stay with me day and night. So never, ever forget.”
These lyrics, playing in the opening scene of Baltasar Kormákur’s new film “Touch” at the M.V. Film Center, prepare us for what lies ahead.
A burial takes place in a cold, stark, wintery Icelandic landscape. Afterward, our widowed protagonist, Kristoffer, poignantly played by Egill Olafsson, comes home to a disquietingly empty house with the photograph of his dead wife as the only human in sight.
The next day or soon after, he awakes from a dream in which two young lovers’ arms, raised gently caressing one another’s hands, lay naked in bed. The touch is tender and full of import.
It soon becomes clear that the woman is a lost lover from his youth. With an impending diagnosis of dementia or the like coming on, Kristoffer’s doctor encourages him to take care of any unfinished business.
So, just as the world is shutting down in 2020 on the verge of the COVID-19 pandemic and against his daughter’s express wishes, Kristoffer takes off to London to find his former love. People wearing masks, enforced social distancing, and the constant reminder that the world is about to close in around him create a sense of urgency as we watch the narrative unfold. For Kristoffer, time is running out, both internally and externally.
From here, the story shifts back and forth in time — primarily from London in the present day to memories of this city in the 1970s, when the affair began.
We meet Kristoffer as a student (appealingly performed by Pálmi Kormákur Baltasarsson) at the London School of Economics. With their long hair and proletariat talk, he and his revolutionary friends are full of youthful naïve zeal. Dissatisfied with school, Kristoffer, on a whim, applies to be a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant. Walking in, he is a world away, cocooned in another culture. The restaurant is run by Takahashi-san. This seemingly good-natured soul quickly takes Kristoffer under his wing, and the young man, in return, throws himself into everything Japanese.
Trouble brews under the surface, though, when Takahashi-san’s winsome daughter Miko (beautifully played by the Japanese model and songwriter Koki) walks through the door. It’s one of those “strangers meet across a crowded room” moments, and our hearts go out to the eventual lovers who come together slowly but with assured inevitability.
Consummately hip, Miko seemingly pushes against her father’s traditional expectations, and initially, we believe that there is nothing more than generational dissonance that separates the two of them. As the film unfolds, however, Miko and her father’s pasts come to the fore, posing both moral and emotional dilemmas that affect the lovers’ longevity.
In the present-day scenes, as Kristoffer searches for Miko, he is full of longing for the touch of the past he and Miko shared, and we walk with him every step of the way through his circuitous journey to reunite.
This gorgeously shot and well-paced film, based on Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson’s book of the same title, poignantly touches upon themes of love, regret, and the passage of time and leaves us yearning to defy the improbability of being able to go home again.
“Touch” plays at the M.V. Film Center on Friday, August 9, and Saturday, August 10, both at 7:30 pm. For tickets and additional information, visit mvfilmsociety.com/2024/07/touch/.
