Blind Massage

推拿

China/France, 2014, colour, 1.85:1, 115 mins.

Director: Lou Ye 娄烨.

Rating: 8/10.

Powerful canvas of emotions set among an ensemble of blind masseurs in Nanjing.

STORY

Nanjing, central China, the present day. After being blinded when young in a car accident, and then spending time at a school for the blind, Xiaoma (Huang Xuan) now works as a masseur at Sha Zongqi Massage Centre, run by the outgoing Sha Fuming (Qin Hao) and the more serious Zhang Zongqi (Wang Zhihua). Sha Fuming’s old village friend, Wang (Guo Xiaodong), calls him asking for a job at the centre, and also brings along his fiancee Xiaokong (Zhang Lei). Another new member of the team is beauty Du Hong (Mei Ting). Between jobs at the busy centre, the blind (or partially blind) masseurs go through various emotional turmoils. The charming Sha Fuming falls for the ideal of Du Hong’s beauty but she rejects him. Xiaoma becomes physically obsessed with the sassy Xiaokong and also spends time with a professional hooker, Xiaoman (Huang Lu), in a backstreet brothel where he’s been taken by his friend Zhang Yiguang (Mu Huaipeng). Jin Yan (Jiang Dan) tries to fight for the love of chubby Xu Taihe (Huang Junjun) when he says she doesn’t deserve him. Meanwhile, Wang has to defend his younger brother who’s being threatened by loan sharks.

REVIEW

Easily the most powerful and innovative Asian film – along with Fruit Chan’s The Midnight After 那夜凌晨，我坐上了旺角开往大埔的红VAN (2014) – among an iffy line-up of premieres at the 2014 Berlinale, Blind Massage 推拿 consolidates the rebirth of Mainland director Lou Ye 娄烨 as a world-class talent that began with his raw, hypnotic Love and Bruises 花 (2011), set in Paris, and continued with his atmospheric meld of love, betrayal and murder in the China-set Mystery 浮城谜事 (2012). The 2011 novel Massage 推拿 by Bi Feiyu 毕飞宇 has already been staged as a 2012 play by theatre director Wang Xiaoying 王晓鹰 and filmed as a controversial 30-part TV drama, See Without Looking, last year by director Kang Honglei 康洪雷. Lou’s version, with a different cast (mixing blind and sighted actors) and different writer (his wife, documentarian Ma Yingli 马英力, 48, who studied at Berlin’s DFFB), marshals his tested technique of intense, close-up visuals and semi-documentary look to plunge the audience into a world where light and darkness lose their usual meaning but basic human emotions (love, jealousy, friendship) remain the same.

It’s a powerful, if slightly over-long, ride through a parallel world of metaphysical cinema that Lou first flirted with in Suzhou River 苏州河 (1999) and the big-budget Purple Butterfly 紫蝴蝶 (2003), before losing his way in Summer Palace 颐和园 (2006) and Spring Fever 春风沉醉的夜晚 (2009), and then starting his renaissance with Love and Bruises. The difference here is that, instead of focusing on a couple of characters, Lou creates a true ensemble movie: the blind and partially sighted masseurs and masseuses of Sha Zonqi Massage Centre, in Nanjing, central China, a distinctly unglamorous, bottom-line undertaking run by the light-hearted Sha Fuming (Qin Hao 秦昊, Spring Fever, Mystery) and Zhang Zongqi (Wang Zhihua 王志华).

The film actually begins from the perspective of a young man, Xiaoma (Huang Xuan 黄轩), who was blinded in a car accident when young and spent fruitless years in a school for the blind before joining the centre. But Lou quickly starts to dispel any thoughts that this is going to be a conventional blind movie with a handsome young lead. As the credits – heard in voice-over, not “seen” on the screen – finish, the focus shifts to Sha Fuming and his onetime fellow villager Wang (Guo Xiaodong 郭晓冬), who’s called to ask him for a job, before fanning out to embrace the centre’s whole community (all dignified with the title “doctor”).

Qin, who’s now beginning to establish a screen presence after a dull start to his career, plays Sha Fuming with charm and utter believability, and, as he and other sighted actors like Huang, Guo and (as a beautiful masseuse) Mei Ting 梅婷 join in, Lou still lets the viewer think that conventional pairings are to develop. In fact, little happens as expected, and the main blind cast – all professional masseurs, and led by the wonderful Zhang Lei 张磊 as Wang’s buxom, sassy fiancee and Huang Junjun 黄军军 as a lovelorn chubby – get equal screen time, with no artificial borders between them and the professionals. That’s as much a tribute to the smooth editing by Kong Jinlei 孔劲蕾 as to the performances, good as they are. And even when Xiaoma’s story looks like reasserting its primacy, as he falls for backstreets hooker Xiaoman (Huang Lu 黄璐, Blind Mountain 盲山, 2007, Unpolitical Romance 水饺几雨, 2012), Lou always makes it clear that his plotline is just part of a broader fabric.

As the oldest and most experienced actress in the cast, Mei has a relatively small role as the masseuse who finds her looks an encumbrance and has to fend off Sha Fuming’s advances with the observation that he’s confusing beauty and obsession with love. The same obsession drives Xiaoma, who gets the hots for Wang’s fiancee, Xiaokong, while also slaking his bodily desires with Xiaoman. And even the seemingly calm Wang reveals unexpected depths of rage when he protects his younger brother from loan sharks. The underlying message – that blind people are as gifted, flawed and passionate as anyone else – comes through in many forms, but through the characters and sub-stories rather than as a politically correct lecture. With the exception of Mei and Huang Xuan, whose playing is slightly more “actorly” than the rest of the cast, performances blend faultlessly, with Guo, Zhang, Qin and Huang Lu especially convincing.

Dispensing with his regular composer, Iran-born Peyman Yazdanian, Lou has found an ideal musical partner for Massage in Iceland’s Jóhann Jóhannsson, whose strings and piano score – by turns baleful, plangent, ethereal and tender – not only helps to guide the audience through the web of emotions but also provides an outstanding accompaniment to the realist/dream-like photography by regular d.p. Zeng Jian 曾剑 – not least in a power-cut sequence and Xiaoma’s final apotheosis. Alongside its scenes of beauty felt or briefly glimpsed, Massage contains moments of humour, joy and pure horror, and Jóhannsson’s music is always there to add colour to Lou’s broad, metaphysical canvas.

The Chinese title simply means “Massage”.

CREDITS

Presented by Shaanxi Culture Industry (CN). Produced by Dream Factory (CN), Les Films du Lendemain (FR).

Script: Ma Yingli. Novel: Bi Feiyu. Photography: Zeng Jian. Editing: Kong Jinlei, Zhu Lin. Music: Jóhann Jóhannsson. Art direction: Du Ailin. Costumes: Zhang Dingmu. Sound: Fu Kang. Visual effects: Liu Song.

Cast: Guo Xiaodong (Wang), Qin Hao (Sha Fuming), Zhang Lei (Kong), Jiang Dan (Jin Yan), Huang Junjun (Xu Taihe), Mei Ting (Du Hong), Huang Xuan (Xiaoma), Huang Lu (Xiaoman), Mu Huaipeng (Zhang Yiguang), Wang Zhihua (Zhang Zongqi), Han Zhiyou (Gao Wei).

Premiere: Berlin Film Festival (Competition), 10 Feb 2014.

Release: China, 28 Nov 2014; France, 13 May 2015.

(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 17 Feb 2014.)