Touch review – unashamedly emotional love story travels back to the 1960s

Baltasar Kormákur’s beautifully shot romance sees Kristófer try to track down Miko, a lifetime after their youthful love affair is unexpectedly cut short

Notes tucked between the leaves of a book; plastic cherry blossoms; a verse or two of an old poem … mere ephemera, to anyone other than the people to whom these relics mean everything. The people in question in this sweeping romantic drama are Kristófer (Palmi Kormákur) and Miko (Kōki), the participants in a clandestine love affair in 1960s London cut brutally short by the obligations of family.

Kristófer is a gentle, politically engaged Icelandic dropout from the London School of Economics, styled after Yoko-era John Lennon and working as a dishwasher in the Japanese restaurant owned by Miko’s father. Miko is a soft-spoken young woman whose quiet demeanor belies a disarmingly frank manner. The 1960s scenes are interlaced with scenes of Kristófer as an old man (played by Egill Ólafsson) attempting to track down Miko a lifetime later in pandemic-era London and Japan, with a view to reconnecting. These types of love stories are seductive; it’s never too late, they whisper – while at the same time showing, in the lost decades etched on Kristófer’s face, how very untrue those seductive whispers are.

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