Touch is a Beautifully Crafted Generational Love Story

At least once in a lifetime, there is a person who has changed our lives for the better from the inside out.  A person whose love resonates so deep and so strong that it transcends time from the past to the present as if not one moment has passed.  Based on the novel Touch (Snerting), widower Kristofer searches for his first love (a woman who disappeared fifty years ago) exploring how one couple’s love and life together was lost as one of the million consequences of war and how trauma from conflict can impact generations for decades to come.

Narratives centered on Hiroshima, more often than not center on the violent loss of life and of war, but is rarely focused on the lives during this unfortunate chapter in history. As hymnal music waves over a desert landscape with one solo traveling for miles, this unconventional love story of an Icelander boy and Japanese girl beautifully takes hold of the audience’s heart and soul.  Yet the title implicates so very much.  The touch of a hand – the imprinting touch in ones’ spirit coupled with how a touch changes the manner in which one is seen and how they view themselves. One of my favorite scenes is when the couple is having what proves to be their first intimate encounter primarily spent with Miko touching Kristóf’s face in the kitchen during food prep and again engaging in these small acts at Miko’s home.  These scenes brought me right back to a previous relationship of my own where my person loved to engage in simple acts of touch to connect. Things like running his fingers or hand across my inner arm, the nape of my neck, interlacing fingers and playing with each other’s palms or a simple grazing across the front and sides of my face were immensely erotic, yet simple and sweet.

Flipping back and forth through time lines of past and present, Kristófer and Miko’s story is told with such gentle humility serving as a wonderful reminder of how catastrophically things went wrong at the end of World War II and how close we are to repeating the mistakes of the past. With a cast whose performances are simply perfection personified, Pálmi  Kormákur (Young Kristófer), Kôki Kamura (Young Miko), Egil Ólaffsson (Kirstófer) and Yôko Narahashi (Miko) collectively make you smile and twist you heart into pieces simultaneosuly with an epic love story going down in history as a classic.

Yet, Touch is so much more than a love story, as it addresses antiquated ideology on reproduction and condemnation on nuclear war bomb children deemed as survivors.  It was believed these children were contagious and that giving birth would result in genetic mutations therefore encouraging the termination and/or giving away of the newborn.  The film also make a bold statement on the complicated dynamics of father and daughter – which transcends generations and ethnicity.

However,witnessing the healing power of food in its preparation and witnessing the strength it has in tethering genders, generations and ethnicities is a theme not taken lightly either. Nor is the determination of finding one’s true love despite the odds. Touch literally tells the truth in the many layers of love for oneself, family and the love of one’s life for better or worse.