'Touch' Review: Flirting in a Japanese Kitchen, Confidential

Director Baltasar Kormákur, who has made a comfortable career alternating between Hollywood tales set in faraway places (“Beast,” “Adrift”) and films set in his native Iceland, returns to his home country for the sweet, sad love story “Touch,” only to hop continents again within its two-hour running time.

Unease permeates the story, adapted from a novel by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson and centered on a romantic memory that animates a widower’s attempt to solve a mystery from his past. The result, anchored by charming performances and Kormákur’s visceral storytelling, is an appealing turning point for a filmmaker who tends to gravitate toward adrenaline-fueled survival stories.

Veteran Icelandic actor and singer Egill Ólafsson plays Kristofer, who is initially in the process of closing his Reykjavik restaurant, leaving his home (“Forgive me,” he says over a photo of who we assume is his late wife) and getting on a plane to London. Radio snippets and masked workers let us know that the pandemic is beginning, and we see Kristofer doing memory exercises, an indication that his dementia is in its early stages. But the more pressing question driving Kristofer is what happened to a woman he fell in love with during his radical college days in the U.K., when he was working as a dishwasher in a Japanese restaurant.

We enter 1960s London, where we meet young Kristofer (played by the director’s hairy son, Pálmi, an untrained actor) and kindly Miko (a radiant Kōki), daughter and co-worker of the restaurant’s hard-working owner, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki). Soon enough, thanks to director of photography Bernsteinn Björgúlfsson’s warm, inviting photography and production designer Sunneva Ása Weisshappel’s richly detailed restaurant set, we feel that this flashback is the film’s central story, a comforting refuge for a makeshift family of immigrants.

Before long, a mentoring relationship develops between the restaurant owner, who is both stern and gregarious, and his new employee, who drops out of school to immerse himself in Japanese culture, from learning the language to cooking the food and even writing haikus. At the same time, an intimacy develops between the two young people under the roof of this thriving restaurant, in furtive exchanges away from the eyes of everyone. But it is a passion that English-speaking Miko has reason to hide from her watchful father, who still struggles with the real and psychological scars of their lives in Japan as survivors of the Hiroshima bombing.

Finally, when the past comes to a head and the possibility of the present takes over, the older Kristofer (whose role Ólafsson gives little weight to) heads to Hiroshima, where all is revealed about a romance that was brutally cut short 50 years earlier. But it’s also when what had been a quietly engaging story — one about strong-willed individuals from very different backgrounds coming together in a foreign land — is ultimately crippled by the added weight of the historical incident. Though Miko’s connection to the bombing is sensitively handled, especially considering how the pandemic plays into the final scenes (which are marked by a moving performance from Yoko Narahashi, the film’s casting director), it also feels forced as a plot device.

But even after the pall of historical tragedy thickens, “Touch” still has much to admire as a love story, especially when it comes to Kormákur’s compassionate manner with actors. His action-movie resume obscures the fact that he also loves what can happen in a small space with glances, words and gestures. He sees sparks between humans everywhere, and that consistency of tenderness is an infectiously apt approach for a tender film in which an old man has held on to the memory of such feelings for decades, hoping to bring them to life once again.