‘Touch’: Baltasar Kormákur’s film of lost love delicately explores the desire for closure, without self-pity

Adapting Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson’s novel, famed Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur (Beast, Everest) crafted a delicate story of lost love in the film Touch (now in theatres). Starring Egill Ólafsson, Kôki, and the filmmaker’s son, Palmi Kormákur, it’s a passionate reflection of time, history and affection.

Set at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film’s main character, widower Kristófer (Ólafsson), receives an early-stage dementia diagnosis. His doctor advises him that at this point in the illness, many people begin to deal with unfinished business in their lives. That begins his journey to track down his first love who he lost contact with 50 years earlier.

Using flashbacks to the 1960s, we find out how Kristófer (a younger version played by Palmi Kormákur) fell in love with Miko (Kôki) when he was a student at the London School of Economics, who ended up taking a job at a Japanese restaurant, owned by Miko’s father. We get the sense that time is ticking for Kristófer to find Miko, as he travels from Iceland to England and Japan amid pandemic restrictions.

“I have found more and more need, as I get older, to have closure on things,” Kormákur told Yahoo Canada. “Things that happened way in the past.”

“My grandfather on the Spanish side, he disappeared when my father was young, and you know he’s living there with you. It’s stuff like that, it wears on you. … I had my challenges with love and I think this weighs really heavily on you.”

‘It takes you to an unexpected place’

For Kormákur, the process of creating Touch began when he got Ólafsson’s book as a Christmas gift from his daughter.

“It’s one of the best gifts I’ve gotten,” Kormákur said. “It ended in this incredible journey, you never know, as in the movie, where things take you.”

“I couldn’t put it down. [The book] takes you to an unexpected place, at least for me. … I thought this was a very genuine way of creating an obstacle, the lovers couldn’t be together. And also a wonderful way into history and leading people with a soft hand to one of the most horrific events we’ve gone through.”

There’s something particularly attractive about the older Kristófer’s journey in this film where, while his diagnosis may have been the catalyst for this path, he never feels sorry for himself. That was also something Kormákur believed was important for the film.

“In Scandinavian filmmaking, especially, there’s a bit of a self-pity, sometimes, I feel,” Kormákur said. “I spoke very clearly to Egill about that.”

“That’s not who he is and he’s not going on this journey because he feels sorry for what happened to him. He feels the need of getting closure, understanding what happened and knowing that it’s something unfinished. One way to do that was to inject a bit of humour into his story.”

From the older Kristófer walking into the restaurant where he worked, which is now a tattoo parlour, to taking a phone call in a restaurant with no other guests, the humour is all quite subtle, with the filmmaking leaning into his appreciation for Jacques Tati, but with an even lighter hand.

“How you just go around in the world and how abstract things can become,” Kormákur explained.

‘I didn’t want him to play Kristófer unless it was totally right’

Kormákur’s son, Palmi, builds a great dynamic with Kôki as younger Kristófer and Miko, but the directer was actually apprehensive about his son taking on a leading role in the film.

“Of course I’m bias, I have to be when it comes to my children, but I was also bias in the way that I didn’t want him to play Kristófer unless it was totally right, because I didn’t want to harm him in the way it can harm people,” Kormákur said.

The filmmaker explained that a number of actors were seen for the role, but there were issues finding the right fit. Then the proposition came up to put one of Kormákur’s two sons in the role. His younger son, Stormur, has acted in several projects, but Kormákur believed he’s “too much of a dude” for the role. Palmi had considerably less experience.

While Kormákur left it in his sons hands if they wanted to audition, when Palmi read for the part it was clear, as Kormákur stated, “that was Kristófer.”

“Because of my bias situation, I sent [the audition to Focus Features] and to my co-producer, and to the writer, who had no idea who Palmi was, … with other auditions as well, and there was a unanimous decision that he was the right guy for the role,” Kormákur explained. “Then I revealed it was my son.”

“It was also a funny moment because Palmi, when he got through the process of it, he suddenly got cold feet. … Then I realized, I don’t have the power here, because I don’t have another choice if he doesn’t do it, I’m really in trouble, which was an interesting twist for me.”

As younger Kristófer, Kormákur’s son has such a tender, nuanced performance, it’s so incredibly affecting you also won’t be able to imagine anyone else in the role after you watch Touch.

‘What I didn’t want to do is to enter a shouting match’

Throughout the evolution of this love story, the trauma of Hiroshima lingers on Miko’s family, which becomes a point of learning as understanding for Kristófer, and Kormákur had a particular way he wanted to present that as an integrated part of the story.

“What I didn’t want to do is to enter a shouting match in a room where people are pointing at each other,” he explained. “Sometimes some things gets lost in polarizing the conversation.”

“I wanted to just focus on, which the book does by the way, in a beautiful way, focus on one victim that wasn’t even born at the time of the bombing, and how it affected even the life of an Icelandic schoolboy in ’69, which is kind of unexpected.”