Starring: Egill Olafsson, Koki, Palmi Kormakur, Yoko Narahashi and Masahiro Motoki
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 121 mins. Reviewed in Aug 2024
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This international romantic drama spans several decades. It follows an elderly man’s emotional journey to find a Japanese woman he loved as a young man.
The film is written by director, Baltasar Kormakur and Olafur Johann Olafsson, and is based on the 2022 novel of the same name written by Olafur Olafsson. It is an international co-production involving Iceland, the US and UK.
The story begins with Kristofer (Kormakur), as a young man, who falls out of favour with his tutors at the London School of Economics for his left-wing leanings. On impulse, he takes a job as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant where he meets and falls in love with the owner’s young daughter, Miko (Koki). Kristofer works hard to earn the trust of Miko and her possessive father, Takahashi-san (Motoki), and they begin a relationship, unbeknown to her father. Returning from a brief holiday away, Kristofer is shocked to find the restaurant closed. Miko and her father have moved to an unknown address.
Fifty years later, Kristofer, a widowed man (Olafsson), has a memory that is starting to fade. He is told by his doctor in London that he is facing seriously declining health. Before his life ebbs away, he makes the decision to go to Japan to try and find Miko. Miko was pregnant with his child when Takahashi-san moved his daughter away, fearful that she and her child would be affected by radiation sickness she could be carrying through exposure to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Afraid of what the future holds, Takahashi-san wanted Miko to give her child up for adoption, and Miko has never married.
Miko (Narahashi), no longer a young woman, tells Kristofer when he finds her that he is the father of her child, and she takes Kristofer to show him his son. Together, he and Miko reunite in their re-kindled love for each other.
The film’s title formally signals the process of touching that sends a message through the central nervous system that the body is ‘feeling’. Behaviours based on ‘touch’ are important, the film says, for keeping loved ones bonded together, and the film powerfully expresses that sentiment. This is a delicately directed romance drama that seamlessly fuses the present with the past, and beautifully expresses the search for love and affection in periods of uncertainty. The movie is expertly acted and directed, and it gently lingers as a compassionate and moving film.
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