TOUCH

An Enchanting Exploration of Lost Love, Regained

Venue(s): Toho Cinemas Hibiya (Chante), possibly any theaters near you. Check at the theaters.
From Jan. 29 (Fri), 2025 to Feb. 20 (Thu)
Language: Icelandic, English, Japanese with English, Japanese subtitles
Official website: touch-movie.com/
Theater website: hlo.tohotheater.jp/net/schedule/081/TNPI2000J01.do
Trailer: https://bit.ly/42vPrM8
Tariff: Please check on the theater site.
Advance tickets: Please check on the theater site.
Talk event: Please check on the theater site.

Title: ＴＯＵＣＨ／タッチ (Touch/Touch)
Director: Baltasar Kormákur (バルタザール・コルマウクル)
Duration: 122 min

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s beautiful, elegiac Touch has finally opened in Japan — where it was primarily shot and is set — and the even better news is that it is screening with English subtitles, as well as Japanese. The international co-production between Iceland, the US and the UK demonstrates precisely how such films can, and should, be made. The achingly romantic tale transcends borders and generations, and was Iceland’s official entry to the 2025 Oscars. Take your friends along and help keep this arthouse gem in the theaters.

Touch opens as a gentle widower named Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson) packs hastily to leave his home in Iceland for London, just before Covid sets in. He’s been told by his doctor that he’s in the early stages of dementia and he should consider resolving his unfinished business. Although we don’t know it yet, Kristófer has decided to search for his lost love, Miko, whom he last saw in London 50 years ago.

The film begins the first of many flashbacks, as we see Kristófer (Palmi Kormákur, the director’s own son, in a star-making turn), an Icelandic economics student in London in the late 1960s. During a time of political unrest, he impulsively drops out of school and applies for a dishwashing job at a Japanese restaurant, Nippon. There, he meets a quirky staff, including an Italian opera-singing chef, and the owner, Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki). Kristófer falls immediately for Miko (Koki), Takahashi’s London-bred, independent-minded daughter.

He works hard, learns some Japanese, and under Takahashi’s tutelage, begins training as a chef. His also begins a secret relationship with Miko, who confides in him about her family’s past as survivors of Hiroshima who moved to England to escape discrimination. But one day, after a short holiday, Kristófer finds Nippon closed and the Takahashis gone. Their absence will plague him for decades, even as he marries and has a successful career as a chef-restaurateur in Iceland.

There is much, much more to this visually rich film, which skillfully bridges the past and present, and brings unexpected depth and breadth to the story, allowing the actors in both periods to shine, among them the excellent Meg Kubota, Masatoshi Nakamura and Yoko Narahashi. Kormákur is also not embarrassed to give audiences a satisfyingly uplifting resolution that might normally have been withheld.

Toho Cinemas Hibiya (Chante)