I consider myself an open-minded person when it comes to film. It doesn’t matter the genre, the language or the year; these are all somewhat superficial details that have nothing to do with my enjoyment at the cinema. In an ideal world, I would walk into the theater knowing as little as possible.
Films like “Touch” test my openness. I’m positively sick of the boring, cookie-cutter structure that it employs. “One Life” uses it, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” uses it and so do countless other snooze fests: the intercut dual narrative in which one half occurs in flashback and the other half occurs in the present. “Touch” doesn’t set itself apart.
Directed by Baltasar Kormákur (“Everest”), the film concerns Kristófer (Palmi Kormakur, “Reykjavik-Rotterdam”), an Icelandic anarchist student studying economics in London, who eventually decides to quit school and work at a Japanese restaurant called Nippon. There, he gets along with everyone, especially the boss’ daughter, Miko (Kōki, “Ox-Head Village”), with whom he starts forming a relationship. Flash forward to the present, Kristófer (Egill Ólafsson, “Angels of the Universe”), now gray-haired and long in the tooth, is a widower. In his old age, he decides to track down Miko before Father Time makes the journey impossible. Both the past and present occur in parallel as “Touch” cuts between Kristófer and Miko’s whirlwind romance and the story of their (potential) reunion 51 years later.
There’s nothing inherently flawed with that premise, but the intercut dual narrative typically suffers from a fatal flaw: The characters’ lives in the present are never as interesting as the past, yet the present shares the same narrative weight. “Touch” is not exempt from the follies of its peers.
Early in the film, a young Kristófer tries to find work now that he’s quit school for some vague political reason. He sees a job opening for Nippon and makes a leap of faith: As a white man with no culinary experience, he decides to interview for work at a Japanese-owned restaurant. Somehow, through humility and Icelandic charm, the kind owner Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki, “Departures”) takes a liking to Kristófer and hires him. Thus, the riveting story of Kristófer’s slow acclimation to a totally new and different environment begins, right?
Wrong. The training that Kristófer undertakes to become a chef — the most interesting and worthwhile part of the story thus far — is montaged to hell. Then, in a baffling decision, the film immediately cuts to his older self walking around the same London area. Now, Nippon has closed down, and it’s been remodeled into a fancy tattoo parlor. Kristófer, on his “I’m-too-old-to-give-a-damn” kick, decides to walk in and get a Japanese word inked on his right shoulder — a useless detail that is only ever shown in passing one other time. This isn’t an isolated creative decision: “Touch” constantly undermines its own momentum by cutting to old Kristófer doing barely relevant things, such as leisurely boarding an airplane, casually sauntering on the streets or quietly snuggling into bed.
Intercut dual narratives hinge on the idea that, through both timelines, the audience gains a better appreciation for the main protagonist’s emotional journey. The irony of “Touch” is that by devoting equal importance to both stories, the film doesn’t have any time to develop its main emotional arc. The romance between Kristófer and Miko happens almost in an instant. Any moment that could further establish their longing for each other — which would help their relationship feel earned — is chopped down to its bare essentials to make room for the sluggish present. The past serves as a purely functional device to provide context, when it should have been its own narrative — a fully developed story to lend some emotional weight to the film. The result of director Kormákur’s structural choice is that we have a perfectly adorable romance that feels rushed, which gets interrupted by a perfectly boring film that could not go by any slower.
All this begs the question: What is gained from seeing an older character reflect on their much more interesting past? “Touch” never answers that question and therefore never justifies its structure. In the past, Kristófer picks up Japanese, writes haikus and cooks scrumptious meals, all while walking in the beautiful streets of London. There are so many beautiful moments here, so it’s a shame that “Touch” didn’t use its runtime time to build on them. In the present, he’s doing … almost nothing until the end. Even at the end, when older Kristófer finally does something of note, the film rushes to throw an emotional gut punch, missing the mark. The main takeaway seems to be that the characters are older now and “what’s done is done.” But this structure is getting old, too. It’s about time we leave it in the past.
Daily Arts Writer Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
The post ‘Touch’: Can we stop making flashback movies? appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply