Living in Hong Kong, it seems we get every soppy story of star-crossed love that the Japanese movie industry churns out. Now, Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (BEAST; ADRIFT) is getting in on the action with a homegrown story of ill-fated love between an Icelandic man and a Japanese woman in TOUCH.

Kristófer (actor-singer-songwriter Egill Ólafsson) is a 70-something year-old widower and restaurateur living just outside of Reykjavik. With his health now failing and little chance of improvement, his doctor suggests that he dedicate whatever productive time he has left to settle any unfinished business he has in his life. With that news and the world just beginning to find itself locked in the grip of the covid pandemic, Kristófer decides to close his restaurant and fly off to London where he was a student 50 years earlier. Back then, young Kristófer (now played by Palmi Kormákur) had been in a relationship with a young Japanese woman named Miko (Kōki). For him, it’s love at first sight and to get to know her, Kristófer takes a job as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant in Soho that is owned and operated by Miko’s father, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki/本木 雅弘, SHALL WE DANCE?). Over the months that follow, Kristófer proves his worth to Takahashi-san and the older man begins to teach Kristófer how to prepare Japanese food. At the same time, Kristófer and Miko begin their relationship but they keep it under wraps because, Miko says, her father wouldn’t like it. One day, Kristófer goes to work and finds that the restaurant has closed and the Takahashis have returned to Japan. Now, as an old man facing his mortality, Kristófer hopes he can find Miko and learn why she left him so abruptly so many years earlier.

If you’re a sucker for this kind of story, then you won’t be disappointed with TOUCH. Even I, who is cynical at the best of times, found its wistfulness somewhat moving. Kormákur Sr., who wrote the screenplay along with New York-based, Icelandic author Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson (no relation to Egill Ólafsson as far as I know), drops a few bombshell revelations along the way to keep the story interesting, though I would have preferred if he had delved a little deeper into them than he did rather than simply using them as melodramatic levers. While that would have made the film’s two-hour running time longer, the director could have made up for it by trimming and even cutting a few other scenes that added colour to the story but weren’t particularly consequential to its outcome. That being said, the filmmaker thankfully had the good sense to end the film at precisely the right moment rather than risk overstaying its welcome.

There is a lot of talk these days about “nepo babies” in Hollywood so it’s interesting to see that this “affirmative action”, as Kamala Harris recently referred to it (but in a different context) exists in Iceland and Japan too. Not only is Palmi Kormákur the director’s son, Kōki’s parents are famous singers in Japan. To their credit though, both actors are very good here and play off of each other well, making for a very believable relationship. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Palmi now has a large female fan base thanks to this film.

TOUCH opens in Hong Kong on Thursday (August 29th). If you’re living outside of Hong Kong, it is already available on a number of streaming platforms.

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