By Peter Keough

There’s no Lubitsch in this Touch.

Touch. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur. At the Boston Common, the Coolidge Corner, the Kendall Square, and the suburbs.

Pálmi Kormákur and Kôki Kimura in a scene from Touch.

Revisiting old loves as a premise, if not a practice, can be risky for filmmakers. Sometimes it pays off, as in Celine Song’s Past Lives (2023), Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, or Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004), also nominated for Best Original Screenplay. And, of course, there’s the perennial favorite Casablanca (1942). Sometimes, though, the resulting film ends up wallowing in listless flashbacks, sodden sentimentality, and tedious contrivance, which is the case with Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s Touch.

It starts out well with the craggy, wry, and troubled face of veteran actor Egill Ólafsson, whose demeanor is well-matched by the sublime desolation of Iceland’s volcanic vistas. Ólafsson plays Kristofer, a septuagenarian Reykjavik restaurateur. Watching him singing his gloomy heart out with a choir in a dirge-like song about never-forgotten lost love establishes that, like the landscape, beneath his battered surface burn unquenchable fires. But the flesh is weak — as a visit to a doctor reveals, Kristofer suffers from some unspecified degenerative cognitive disorder. The doctor warns him that many who have received such a diagnosis feel compelled to confront unresolved issues in their past. Sound advice perhaps, and sadly ignored by both Kristofer and Kormákur.

For Kristofer is flying to London to track down an old love, Miko (Kôki Kimura), whom he met cute in 1969 while a student at the London School of Economics. Cue the swinging England of the ’60s, where Kristofer, then a towering, hirsute, and callow youth (played by the director’s son Pálmi Kormákur), is deep into Marx, Revolution, and saving the world. A student strike fires up his identification with the proletariat and, on a dare, he decides to join them, taking a job as a dishwasher at a Japanese restaurant. While applying at the establishment for the position, he locks eyes with Miko (Kôki Kimura), the hip daughter of the intimidating but jocular owner Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki, the second-best thing in the movie). And so he falls in love: it is torch that still burns 50 years later, evidence of which can be discerned in the latter-day Kristofer’s ruefully determined eyes.

So much for the proletariat and the revolution. Shyly and tentatively at first, and fearful of Takahashi-san’s wrath, the pair become lovers, cuddling cozily in the sack in Kristofer’s garret apartment where he studies Japanese and she spends most of her time just being adorable, or sneaking off to her place hoping the old man does not return unexpectedly. Until, one day, Kristofer receives an envelope with his severance pay. He learns that the restaurant has shut down and the owner and his daughter have split with no forwarding address.

But old Kristofer is still on the case and has tracked Miko back to Japan. Following up on leads, he hits it off with an elderly Japanese counterpart with whom he drinks and swaps sad stories and shares faux, mawkish, old man wisdom. Meanwhile, Touch takes in the local ambiance with a dilettantish smugness that borders on appropriation — especially when compared to the undemonstrative embrace of the culture in a film like Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days. Worse is the inclusion of the Hiroshima bombing as a plot device.

Perhaps the clumsiest artifice, though, is the flashback structure (apparently adopted from the film’s source material, Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson’s novel of the same title, which I have not read). Snippets of past and present pass by in seconds; they make little impression, and are connected via random, superficial, or glib transitions. There are flashbacks within flashbacks, flashbacks from other character’s points of view, and flashbacks to another period in Kristofer’s life as a middle-aged man. In the latter he confronts difficulties in his marriage with his then living wife — a subplot that goes nowhere. All of this shuffling is handled artlessly and to no lasting effect. One of the virtues of cinema is its power to reflect the passage of time, to evoke memory, loss, and transience. But to do so takes an artist’s touch, which Kormákur achieves only when his camera lingers on Ólafsson’s ineffably haggard face.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).