Movie releases. "Touch - Our Past Embraces": an exploration of young love
A nuanced adaptation of Olafur Johann Olafsson's sensitive novel, about the painful yet liberating truth: some love stories don't need to end to exist. In theaters this Wednesday.
Egill Olafsson, actor with Parkinson's disease. Photo Condor Distribution
As we age, there is sometimes only a thin thread between what we have experienced and what we believe we are still experiencing. Memory is thus fragile, wavering, on the verge of breaking. Touch makes it the central motif of a personal journey: Kristofer, a widower suffering from Alzheimer's, leaves before oblivion. He does not want to flee, but to find: love, the first, the great one - the beautiful Miko, between the vapors of a Japanese restaurant and the London rain of the 1960s.
From Iceland to Japan, via England, the sick man walks back over his past and his youthful love life. The film embraces the modesty, simplicity, and delicacy of its character. Filled with flashbacks, the story takes a long, slow journey through places and times. And fiction connects with the man: Eigill Olafsson, who plays Kristofer, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, lends his own fatigue to the role. This is no longer just a man searching for a woman he once loved: it's a faltering existence searching for itself in its own footsteps.
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It's impossible not to think of Céline Song's Past Lives , where two people separated by time and continents wonder about what their life together could have been like. Here too, in Touch , there's a migration, uprooted roots, a different language in the other's mouth. Here too, a love on hold, a parallel life, perhaps dreamed of, perhaps real, perhaps both. And the same restraint, the same way of never forcing emotion.
Touch and Past Lives respond to each other with their lucid nostalgia, with this way of filming absence with a disarmed tenderness. They speak of the bridges we don't cross, the trains we let go, the faces that have become blurred images. Recounting the impossible return, they stage something rare and precious: an intimate reconciliation with the past. How to say goodbye, looking it in the eye.
Touch - Our Past Embraces by Baltasar Kormakur, in theaters this Wednesday, July 30. Running time: 2 hours 01 minutes.
Le Progres
