Touch (15)
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur
 

 
IT SEEMS like a lifetime ago that Covid-19 brought the country and the globe to a standstill with national lockdowns, people not being able to touch staying six feet apart and asked to wear masks. Yet the pandemic is the backdrop for this beautiful and heart-wrenching interracial love story spanning decades.
 
It’s directed by Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormakur, who co-wrote the film with Olaf Olafsson adapting the later’s 2020. It follows widower Kristofer (Egill Olafsson) as he leaves his Reykjavik home to head to London in search of his first love to learn why she disappeared on him over 50 years earlier.
 
As the capital is about to shut down Kristofer, who suffers from early dementia, reminisces about his student days in London and meeting and falling in love with Miko (Koki) in the summer of 1969.
 
Fervently political and a staunch communist at the time, the young Kristofer (Palmi Kormakur), who studied at the London School of Economics, was challenged by his friends to join the working class by applying for a job at a nearby Japanese restaurant called Nippon.

He then decides to drop out of the LSE and become a dish washer there and he meets the owner’s daughter Miko and it is love at first sight. The father (Masahiro Motoki) takes him under his wing as Kristofer immerses himself in the Japanese language and culture.
 
Kormakur, who is better known for his big budget action films like Beast, delivers a quietly powerful yet mesmerising romantic drama with three captivating leads in Koki, Kormakur’s son Palmi in his first ever principal film role and Olafsson, who is actually suffering from Parkinson’s disease which brings an extra dimension to his portrayal.
 
Both Miko and her dad survived the bombing of Hiroshima escaping to England. The film explores the discrimination and racism Miko faced as a Japanese immigrant in London but also as a “hibakusha” — a nuclear bomb survivor.  

Touch examines the stigma and how one generation passes the trauma from conflict onto the next.
 
It is also about the compromises people make in their personal lives and about achieving closure. You cannot help but root for Kristofer as he heads to Japan to find answers.
 
Gorgeous, terribly moving and thought provoking. I cannot recommend it enough.
 
 In cinemas from tomorrow.