Touch
Cinestudio
Hartford
Aug. 19, 2024
This review contains spoilers for the movie.
“What’s going on, Miko? Can you tell me what you’re thinking?”
Kristófer, the main character of the film Touch, asks his girlfriend Miko that question after she comes to him with tears in her eyes. It’s an apt question, and unfortunately the movie never gives us an answer.
Touch, which I saw at my favorite local theater, Cinestudio, is the story of an Icelandic man named Kristófer (played by Palmi Kormákur as a young man and Egill Ólafsson as an elder) who moves to London to go to school, but drops out and starts working in a family-owned Japanese restaurant where he meets Miko (played by Japanese model and songwriter Kôki as a young woman and Yôko Narahashi as an elder). The two fall in love, until Miko mysteriously vanishes one day. Later in life, after his wife has died, Kristófer decides to track down Miko before it’s too late.
One thing the film has going for it is the authentic feeling of being immersed in a cosmopolitan center like London in the 1970s. The film is shot in a mix of Icelandic, Japanese and English, and it gives the setting an expansive feeling, as if the entire world has gathered in the alleyways and restaurants where the film takes place. The cinematography by Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson feels gentle, treating the various locations in Iceland and Japan with a loving touch that lets the natural beauty stand on its own.
However, Touch is not a documentary. It’s a love story, and despite some good elements, it doesn’t stand very strong on those terms. The main problem is that Miko is given almost no interiority as a character. There’s a scene in the beginning of the movie where Kristófer meets Miko’s dad, Takahashi (played with humor by Masahiro Motoki), and the two bond over their shared history of fishing. It gives Takahashi depth, and the foundation for a likable relationship that develops between the two.
Miko gets none of that. The only thing we know that she likes is Kristófer, and presumably the Beatles because she compares Kristófer to John Lennon, a line which actively made me groan. It was a warning sign that Miko wouldn’t actually be a character in the film, just a reflection of the protagonist’s longings and desires.
But it’s even worse than that, because Miko becomes a stand-in for historical forces far beyond her. She’s a hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. Her mother was six months pregnant with her on that awful day, but we only learn about how the bombing killed her mother and affected her father — until Miko’s history with the bomb interacts with her relationship with Kristófer.
Takahashi is convinced that any child Miko might have will be deformed as a result of her exposure to the radiation, and demands that she be sterilized. Instead, they find out together that Miko is pregnant with Kristófer’s child. Takahashi closes the restaurant, and he and Miko move back to Japan without a word to Kristófer. This information is revealed to Kristófer at the end of the movie, when he finds her in Japan after fifty years. But the information doesn’t bring Miko into relief as a fully realized character or give her any agency. It reduces her even further: she had no choice in leaving London, no choice in keeping the child (who is put up for adoption) and no choice in seeing Kristófer again.
It’s hard to get invested in a love story where there’s really only one character. I’m reminded of Titanic, another period love story framed through the elderly recollections of its protagonist. But there, both Rose and Jack are independent characters who come together, instead of shadows that define each other. A stronger characterization for Miko would have helped a film that could have been much stronger with two people at the center instead of just one.
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Touch runs at Cinestudio through Aug. 22.
Jamil heads downtown to check out what’s Ripe.
