'Massage’ movie turns spotlight on blindness
Print Edition
“BLIND Massage,” the award-winning new film by Shanghai director Lou Ye, throws a rare spotlight on those who cannot see for themselves in a country where the disabled are sometimes marginalized.
Based on Bi Feiyu’s wildly popular novel “Massage,” the low-budget feature, which went on general release in China yesterday, tells the story of a small blind community working in a therapeutic massage parlor in the eastern city of Nanjing.
China is home to at least 85 million disabled people, of whom about 12 million are blind, according to the China Disabled Persons Federation.
For them, massage offers an escape from poverty and ostracism, and several hundred thousand work in salons and parlors across the country.
“It was a taboo subject — but not any more, it seems to me,” Lou said at his film’s premiere in Beijing this week.
Starring both sighted and unsighted actors, “Blind Massage” explores the lives and loves of the masseurs, with some scenes deliberately blurred to give the viewer a sense of having poor vision.
Shocking scenes
Desperation is never far from their lives, and some parts of the film — including mutilations — are undoubtedly shocking.
The blind see themselves as outsiders to mainstream society, a narrator explains in a voice-over, and their own community is divided between those who had the ability to see and gradually lost it and those born without sight.
The question of who is beautiful becomes a matter of huge curiosity even as they spend their lives in the dark.
One character is taken to a brothel where he becomes infatuated with a prostitute, but their dynamic shifts dramatically when his sight begins to return.
Corrupt officials, loan sharks and callous family members who abandon their blind kin also get an airing.
It has echoes in the life of Fu Chiyou, who expertly pummels his customers’ feet while perched on a tiny stool in a Beijing hairdressing salon.
The 38-year-old was born blind into a family of farmers in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province.
Forced into a relatively solitary existence because of his disability, he spent his childhood and adolescence in the company of just his family and two friends.
Few blind people manage to marry or secure stable employment, he said.
“I never had anything to do, and my parents worried about my future,” Fu said.
“So I thought of going to a massage school for the blind.”
It took Fu five years to perfect the art of massage under the traditional principles of Chinese medicine, learning the secrets of the human form and its pressure points.
“The blind have a more developed sense of hearing, as well as a more developed sense of touch,” he said.
He works from 3pm to midnight every day, with the salon owner providing his lodgings and a modest salary.
The Beijing premiere for “Blind Massage” was packed after the film scooped top honors at last weekend’s Golden Horse film awards in Taiwan, which are touted as the Chinese-language Oscars.
It also fared well at this year’s Berlin film festival, winning the Silver Bear prize for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.
Fu will never see the movie, but is very much aware of it.
“For the first time there’s a film that talks about our lives,” he said as he dug his thumb into the sole of a customer's foot. “That can only be a good thing.”
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