“Touch” is a lovely, patient romantic melodrama about remembering and pursuing that woman whose gentle caress a man remembers from the first time they met, long ago.

This search will take Kristófer from Iceland to London and beyond. Kristófer is in his 70s, with hints of failing health and “unfinished business” in his quest.

He undertakes this task just as COVID lockdowns are spreading, like the virus, across the globe, a time when human contact turned fraught, sharpening the connection of that most memorable “Touch” from long ago.

This Icelandic saga, spoen in English, Icelandic and Japanese, will be told by the Icelandic action producer and director best known for the Mark Wahlberg smuggling thriller “Contraband” and “Two Guns,” with Denzel and Wahlberg, and “Everest,” of all people. And it will co-star that director’s son.

How do they say “Nepo Baby” in Icelandic?

Amazingly, Baltasar Kormákur’s film comes together in a tale told with great sensitivity and patience, probably owing to the novelist who wrote this story participating in the adaptation.

Kristófer, played with quiet sensitivity by veteran Icelandic actor Egill Ólafsson, lives in a small town, sings in the local men’s choir and runs a restaurant, which keeps him focused on the present. But he’s a widower facing an MRI over signs of some brain malady and is keenly aware time is running out.

Even with COVID just rearing its head around the world, he gets on a plane for London. That “unfinished business” his doctor suggested he settle is on his mind.

In the tumultuous late ’60s, Kristófer (played as a young man by Palmi Kormákur) was a leftist/anarchist, in step with his generation and out of place as a student at the London School of Economics. One day, after a protest, he shocks his friends with the rash decision to apply for a job at the Nippon Japanese restaurant.

The owner (Masahiro Motoki, terrific) is a little put-out at the applicant. His eatery caters largely to Japanese expats seeking an “authentic” taste of home, and the entire staff is Japanese. But he’s open-minded enough to stop fathering the kid (no dad, Japanese or otherwise, would endorse a kid giving up a prestigious education) and bring him on.

He might want to do something with all that stringy, greasy ’60s hair the 20something keeps running his fingers to.

What closes the deal for future-dishwasher Kristófer is encountering the young woman (model, songwriter and novice actress Kôki) who turns out to be the owner’s daughter, a student and a waitress at Nippon. The mere touch by Miko, gently making her way past him, seals their fate.

They work together, and even though she is a student herself, involved with a more ambitious Japanese classmate, even though her father is stern about her love life, as he studies Japanese language and Japanese cooking and she studies him with curiosity mixed with growing infatuation, they fall in love.

Something tore them apart, and our sense of the elderly Kristófer, who revisits this romantic past in flashbacks, is that he wants answers for what split them apart almost as much as he craves one last caress from his first great love.

“Touch” enfolds memories of a great love lost, learning Japanese history and cuisine, travel, the COVID crisis and old age in telling this slow-moving, emotionally-muted romance.

Young Kristófer learns from Miko that Hiroshima brought her and her father to London. The rest of the colorful restaurant staff (Meg Kubota, Charles Nishikawa and Tatsuya Tagawa) teaches him the seriousness of the business of welcoming, feeding and serving people and helps him with his Japanese.

Through him, we learn about the culture that would go on to produce “Iron Chef,” its history and the Japanese word “hibakusha” in all its darker shadings.

Ólafsson makes a mild-mannered lead, just avuncular enough to charm, worldly but still a fish-out-of-water on this quest. The younger leads show their inexperience in performances that are very much skin-deep. If we don’t feel a great passion emerging between Miko and Kristófer, that’s on them and the director for casting a relative and somebody more cute than experienced.

But emotional shortcomings aside, “Touch” still pulls you in, an immersive story of alien worlds — the 1960s, Iceland and Japan — sympathetically and patiently told, a lovely two hour break from the world and the fresh waves of bad news that stain even the best of times.

Rating: R, sex, gruesome images of Hiroshima, smoking

Cast: Egill Ólafsson, Kôki, Masahiro Motoki, Palmi Kormákur, Yôko Narahashi, Meg Kubota, Charles Nishikawa, Tatsuya Tagawa and Ruth Sheen

Credits: Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, scripted by Olaf Olafsson and Baltasar Kormákur, based on a novel by Olaf Olafsson. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:02