Visual beauty is meaningless: beauty is just an abstract concept.
What is beauty? Philosopher Li Zehou believes that beauty is not only the objective nature of things, but also must appeal to people’s sensibility. In the discerning eye, visual beauty is tangible. For people who are born blind or have been blind since childhood, visual beauty is just an abstract concept, or it simply doesn’t exist. In Sha Zongqi Massage Center in the film, Mei Ting plays Du Hong as the most beautiful massage teacher. Her appearance has won praises from many guests and brought many repeat customers to the massage center. However, Du Hong did not feel lucky, but was deeply confused. She is like a rich man who has mastered a huge amount of foreign currency. She lives in a country where only her own currency is allowed to circulate, and she doesn’t know how to measure and dispose of her wealth.
Sha Fuming suffers from the inability to understand the beauty of Duhong.
Also puzzled by this is Sha Fuming (Qin Hao), the boss of Massage Center. He is a person who values and pursues beauty, and likes Sanmao’s prose and Haizi’s poetry. The guest’s praise for Du Hong broke his inner peace, and he took pains to think about what beauty was, and felt pain for being puzzled. This is an unanswered question. Sha Fuming refused to give up. He followed the trail of Duhong, approached her and touched her, hoping that Mei could reveal even a little secret to him, but it was all in vain. In his obsession with beauty, he fell in love with Duhong. Du Hong refused him: "What you love is just a concept!" Sha Fuming was speechless. It is amazing that although neither of them can understand the visual beauty, this concept has played the same role as in the world of discerning people: making you fall in love with someone, or becoming a weapon to refuse love.
Beauty is abstract. If the beauty of all red is not so conspicuous, then blind people probably won’t judge people by beauty and ugliness. For them, it is realistic to ignore beauty and ugliness. Lou Ye is bold, and his film is very explicit in showing people’s disgrace. The amateur blind actors he chose were not as beautiful as actors, and their eye muscles twitched awkwardly, and they could not convey goodwill with their eyes. If all this is presented in a long-term perspective, it won’t be so shocking, but Lou Ye uses close-ups. When we are infected by blind people’s emotions and feel their inner "quiet despair", "Massage" becomes a hymn to the truth, and all the love of handsome men and beautiful women that we have seen in other films (including Lou Ye’s past works) becomes artificial.
We must stop and think about what beauty and ugliness are, redefine them and think about their meaning; We need to reflect on how beauty colludes with hypocrisy and vanity, and why we tend to please beauty and cover up ugliness; We need to face up to the inequality of human appearance, face up to ugliness, respect ugliness and even love ugliness. The human condition is generally miserable, and the discerning are no better than the blind. As for what is beauty, there is no simple answer, and Sha Fuming can’t figure it out, which is also a difficult problem for the discerning audience.
Wang Dafu and Kong are a couple, and the pony falls in love with Kong because of the smell.
Smelled love: the smell and the feeling of touch
Love is Lou Ye’s most concerned theme, and Massage is also a love movie. This film has many protagonists and tells the story of their love. Sha Fuming’s unrequited love for Du Hong is just one of many love relationships. Du Hong has another heart. She likes ponies (Huang Xuan). Pony loves Kong (Zhang Lei) at first, and Kong is the fiancee of Dr. Wang (Guo Xiaodong). Later, Pony fell in love with Xiaoman (Huang Lu), a prostitute. In addition to their seemingly chaotic relationship, Jin Yan (Jiang Dan) and Xu Tailai (Junjun Huang) are two of a kind. Except for the last two, the above groups of relationships have basically received the same degree of attention. These loves are only related to Sha Fuming’s love for Duhong and his obsession with beauty, while others have nothing to do with appearance and temperament.
Lou Ye believes in love. At least none of the above relationships we have seen live together. Love is the basis for them to get together, and it is also because of the lack of love that they stubbornly say no to people they don’t love, even if the other party can provide material guarantee for their illusory future. Du Hong refused Sha Fuming mainly because he had no feelings for him. And the cause of this feeling is connected with smell, hearing and touch. On the first day of Wang Dafu’s employment with Xiao Kong, Pony sensitively noticed the smell of Xiao Kong, and fell in love with it as soon as he sniffed it. Later, he hid Xiao Kong’s clothes and smelled it when nothing happened. This kind of love is at two poles of a coordinate with the kind of online love that has never met before and is deeply loved only by photos and online chat. According to the understanding of Huang Xuan, the pony player, Pony is still in the ignorant state of love at this time, and what attracts him is "a kind of maternal breath" or "some peculiar smells of the opposite sex".
Pony is also obsessed with the smell of small man.
In order to help Xiao Ma get rid of his depression, colleague Zhang Yiguang (Huaipeng Mu) takes him to the shampoo room for whoring. There, the pony gradually became attached to Xiaoman, so that he thought that he had betrayed Xiao Kong and could not tolerate Xiaoman accepting other guests. What made the pony fall in love with Xiaoman? We can only guess: it is Xiaoman’s smell, voice, or the sexual pleasure she brings to the pony. Since blind people can’t gain trust and communicate spiritually through their eyes, they can only achieve the same goal through physical contact. Sex is the condition of blind people’s love (in many discerning people, it turns out to be the result). Because of this, we see that Lou Ye shows the process of sex between Wang Dafu and Xiao Kong in a direct way. Only in this way can we feel the inseparable love between them.
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