Post by joekiddlouischama on Jul 18, 2024 9:31:25 GMT
Making a film that is both sentimental and tense, that seamlessly weaves a wistful love story with one of the odious legacies of the atomic bomb, is not an easy task. Yet that is exactly what Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur manages to achieve in Touch, an Icelandic movie (distributed in the US by Focus Features) shot on location in Iceland, England, and Japan. The result is an engrossing, bittersweet, humanistic film strengthened by sensitive acting and an organic rhythm.
Based on some of his other movies from the last decade, Kormákur would not seem a likely candidate for such an idiosyncratic achievement. In films such as Everest (2015) and Adrift (2018), he provided the requisite visual scope, but the storytelling proved banal. In this case, though, he and Olaf Olafsson adapted a novel written by Olafsson to find something much more personal and meaningful. While Touch's narrative structure is not novel and proves somewhat melodramatic, the basic story elements prosper from a fresh context and an unexpected sense of cross-cultural fertilization. Indeed, Touch is the affecting meditation on lost love, across time and space, that last year's overrated Oscar nominee, Past Lives, was supposed to be.
Visually, Kormákur combines soft lighting (which matches the film's sentimental, although not maudlin, tone) with genuine contrasts to create a painterly quality. And his sense of place and space is intimate and detailed, giving the movie a real lived-in dynamic. The overall result is that while Touch is a romantic, star-crossed tale based on a novel, it is also something that one could imagine as based on a true story. And in shuttling between early 2020— the initial days of the pandemic, with its omnipresent masks and temperature checks at airports, its hotels that were about to shutter and the genuine fear that any contraction of COVID could constitute a death sentence— and London circa 1969, all pressing against the backdrop of what took place in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Touch fosters a fatalistic mood, a sense of tragedy without cynicism. It is a movie that suggests loss without hopelessness, unrepaired fractures yet incipient healing.
Based on some of his other movies from the last decade, Kormákur would not seem a likely candidate for such an idiosyncratic achievement. In films such as Everest (2015) and Adrift (2018), he provided the requisite visual scope, but the storytelling proved banal. In this case, though, he and Olaf Olafsson adapted a novel written by Olafsson to find something much more personal and meaningful. While Touch's narrative structure is not novel and proves somewhat melodramatic, the basic story elements prosper from a fresh context and an unexpected sense of cross-cultural fertilization. Indeed, Touch is the affecting meditation on lost love, across time and space, that last year's overrated Oscar nominee, Past Lives, was supposed to be.
Visually, Kormákur combines soft lighting (which matches the film's sentimental, although not maudlin, tone) with genuine contrasts to create a painterly quality. And his sense of place and space is intimate and detailed, giving the movie a real lived-in dynamic. The overall result is that while Touch is a romantic, star-crossed tale based on a novel, it is also something that one could imagine as based on a true story. And in shuttling between early 2020— the initial days of the pandemic, with its omnipresent masks and temperature checks at airports, its hotels that were about to shutter and the genuine fear that any contraction of COVID could constitute a death sentence— and London circa 1969, all pressing against the backdrop of what took place in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Touch fosters a fatalistic mood, a sense of tragedy without cynicism. It is a movie that suggests loss without hopelessness, unrepaired fractures yet incipient healing.
