An Icelandic film about an old man’s quest to track down a fleeting love from sixty years earlier, Touch is constructed as the current day search from Iceland to London to Japan interspersed with the romance’s unfolding as an extended flashback. The core of the film is undoubtedly the latter, as a Finnish university student in sparky 1960s London drops out to learn cooking in a bustling Japanese restaurant. He befriends the restaurant’s owner and gradually falls in love with the owner’s daughter. The flashbacks are filmed in soft, lustrous colors that enhance the idyllic times, and the two key actors, Palmi Kormákur and Kôki are excellent as beautiful young idealists. The present-day plot (actually it is set in 2020, complete with Covid lockdowns) looks more muted and the updated key actors, Egill Ólafsson and Yôko Narahashi, are also muted. A plot twist in the form of a historic tragedy underlying the daughter’s sudden departure provides some dramatic tension in the present-day sequence but it fails to rescue it from mundanity. Overall, Touch offers many lovely, rhapsodic scenes but fails to grab the viewer.
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