The film that Baltasar Kormákur made immediately prior to Touch (Snerting) was Beast (2022) a survival adventure where Idris Elba punches a lion. Seeing the Icelandic director’s name attached to a heartbreaking and heart healing story of love and yearning, spanning three countries and fifty years, is surprising. However unexpected it is for Kormákur (known mostly for crime and disaster thrillers) to pivot in such a radical manner to a melancholy romantic drama, it is exceedingly welcome.
Adapted from the bestselling novel by Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, Touch is a gentle film about a gentle man. Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) is an Icelandic widower and restaurateur who makes the decision to track down a woman he loved and lost fifty years previously.
Given a dementia diagnosis Kristófer’s doctor suggests he might like to start tying up any loose ends. Thus, he takes the risk to fly to London, just as the world is shutting down due to COVID. His younger self (played by Palmi Kormákur) walked into a small Japanese restaurant in London fifty years ago looking for a job as a dishwasher and came out a changed man – both in terms of temperament and falling profoundly in love with the beautiful Miko (Kōki) the daughter of the owner Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki) who becomes his mentor.
When Kristófer walks into the Nippon Restaurant in 1969, it is an era of profound social change. Kristófer had been involved with student protesting and Miko is trying to balance the traditionalism of her father and the modernity of her London life. At first Miko is content to tease Kristófer with her blunt and personal questions, she observes the thoughtful young man who tries hard to genuinely adapt to, and learn from, the lessons given in Japanese. Kristófer’s presence brings out the best in Takahashi who entrusts his recipes and kitchen to him. However, no-one it seems is allowed to be entrusted with Miko – not even an entirely suitable Japanese boyfriend. Unsurprisingly, Miko and Kristófer begin a passionate affair that must remain hidden from Takahashi for reasons Kristófer cannot properly comprehend.
Touch unfolds in a non-linear manner. As Kristófer in the present wanders through London looking for a trace of Miko we see how his memories are triggered. There is a goldenness to them in places, warmed by the glow of twin loves; his love for the Nippon kitchen and the art of Japanese cooking, and the sensual and emotional connection he has with the intoxicating Miko.
His adoptive daughter Sonja (voice of Harpa Elísa Þórsdóttir) calls him repeatedly clearly (and justifiably) stressed by what seems to be an indecipherable decision. Why is ill her father flying around the world during a pandemic to find someone she’s never heard of? Although we know Kristófer married Inga (María Ellingsen) and adopted Sonja, Kormákur generally only hints at their domestic situation during the film.
In the kitchen of the Nippon, Kristófer becomes a beloved part of the staff, especially by Hitomi (Meg Kubota) whose good humour brings him out of his shell. Takahashi finds a surrogate son in Kristófer, although he’d never admit it. Someone who, like him, is away from his home and shows grace towards the best of his Japanese heritage – which for Takahashi is the ritual of traditional food preparation and the delicate balance of restraint – such as the discipline of the haiku. The Nippon is a small sanctuary for Takahashi who is a widow scarred by prejudice in Japan and who was forced to emigrate with Miko in 1957.
Miko is a Hibakshu, a child born of a survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and marked as defective in Japan. The tragedy is that Miko can’t adequately explain to Kristófer what it means to be Japanese and be suffering because the world rarely spoke of the Japanese perspective of Hiroshima and Nagasaki even by 1969. In England, she and Takahashi can have a new life, but they still face racism (shown when Kristófer’s erstwhile University friends come to the restaurant making ‘kamikaze’ jokes).
Kristófer’s time in the Nippon makes him feel like he understands parts of Japanese culture, but he is relatively naïve. He is unprepared for the shock of one day returning from a short holiday and finding the Nippon closed and only a final pay cheque waiting for him. The young lovers are lost to each other, and he has also lost his mentor and only true friend in London. The people who asked him to sing, who taught him a new language and culture, who radically accepted the long-haired Icelandic ‘anarchist’ as a cook.
In the present Kristófer discovers that Takahashi and Miko returned to Japan as soon as they shuttered the Nippon. Once again, he boards a plane. There is a distinct sweetness to how Kormákur portrays how Kristófer experiences Japan, a place where two men can bond over noodles and end up drinking and singing karaoke.
Miko (Yoko Narahashi) is alive and Kristófer stands outside her modest apartment hoping for a chance to reunite. Now in their seventies it would seem absurd for two people to fall back into a romance as if a complete life had not been lived in the interim, but because of the way Kormákur has structured the film, one absolutely hopes that it is still possible. Everything we learned about the two young people; his curiosity, sensitivity, and warmth and her passion, pain, and desire for freedom gave us an idealised notion of a timeless romance unfairly ended.
Egill Ólafsson and Yoko Narahashi’s versions of the two meet each other with immense kindness. Bitterness is not the aim of Touch, but rather the bittersweet. The promise of what could have been but never was guided Kristófer’s search, but he wasn’t looking for an explanation from Miko (who nonetheless gives it – and it is heartbreaking) but rather to ensure that his first love has lived well.
Touch is the essence of a film about love rather than once about romance. The wonderful chemistry between Palmi Kormákur’s Kristófer, the bespectacled introspective intellectual, and Kōki’s Miko, the frank and challenging modern woman, is more than physical (although they are both lovely and meld together as lovers with great sensuality). It is built on the delicate balance where they hold space for each other. When they finally meet again there are no recriminations. Egill Ólafsson’s Kristófer shows unchanged tenderness to Yoko Narahashi’s Miko as he cares for her as she recovers from COVID. Time and experience changes people, Kristófer says he is now simply “old” to Hitomi. Time has not changed the space Kristófer and Miko hold for each other. A man who will soon be without memories takes the chance to do what seems impossible – to share time with a profound love. They are different people now, but they are also the young adults who caught each other’s gaze one afternoon in a small restaurant.
The snowy landscape of Iceland gives way to a near silent London and then an uncrowded Japan pulling the focus on to Egill Ólafsson’s Kristófer’s singular purpose. The warmth and allure of his memories; not only with Miko but also the secret wishes he wrote in haiku, the jokes shared with the staff of the Nippon, and the patient art of Japanese cuisine, are rich and beautifully crafted. The heartache of the film is not played for melodramatic purposes, and the sentimentality of Touch is tempered and balanced.
Touch is Baltasar Kormákur’s masterpiece. The Icelandic director is given the opportunity to be in control of a film where courage isn’t surviving a disaster on Everest or facing down a group of gun toting crooks. Courage is deciding that with whatever time there is left you find a person you loved and reach out your hand. Touch is a testament to all that survives in the heart.
Touch (Snerting) is in cinemas now.
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Writers: Baltasar Kormákur & Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson (based on “Touch” by Ólafsson)
Starring: Egil Ólafsson, Palmi Kormakur, Kōki, and Masahiro Motoki
