Watch The Masseurs and a Woman For Free

Very disappointed :(

Great Film overall

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Viewed on DVD. Restoration = eight (8) stars. A small movie that progressively diminishes in the eyes of the viewer. All directors have bad hair days including Hiroshi Shimizu. Filled with the germ of many possible situations to explore cinematically, the film repeatedly fails to pursue much of anything. The director does not establish and build a lot in the way of rapport between the characters and the audience. Since the viewer is unable to identify with the characters, who cares about the characters' real and imaged (and truncated) predicaments? Massages as depicted here are a joke! All are amateurish and never touch the skin of a recipient (fabric finger-tip wrinkle removal?)! Camera work and sound are fine, and the restoration is suburb. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

This film reminds me a lot of Jacques Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday. It's an ensemble piece taking place at a spa. The main characters are a group of blind masseurs and, as the title says, a woman, but there are several other characters wandering around the resort. It has a certain gentleness to it that's really quite wonderful, and it's beautifully made. There are a couple of standout sequences, most notably the one where one blind masseuse encounters the woman and notices her by her perfume. But she stays completely silent and watches him while he searches for her. The tone of the film is slightly comic, but in this area it doesn't succeed very well. There are a lot of jokes at the expense of the blind men, which just seems tasteless, even for 1938.

Director Shimizu's film is fairly unique, about a group of blind masseurs who go to work at a retreat in the mountains to ply their trade. Once there, one particular one named Toku massages a young woman from Tokyo (her name is never mentioned) who seems to be escaping or hiding something. He is very interested in her, as is a young man who brought his nephew to the retreat. a few things happen, but this film is not about action its about infatuation, trust and loneliness. What I find fascinating about this film is the emphasis on the characters, specifically the blind men. You see how aware they are of their surroundings, how they react to things and how they make their choices. The film is meant to play at a slow pace, so don't expect action. The film is about 66 minutes long, but I was waiting for the next scene to see what happens. Through use of multiple fade outs, you see how the scenes become a new situation in which to focus on. I have seen this director's "Ornamental Hairpin", which is also on the Janus films collection released domestically. I highly recommend it, because this is a director forgotten in the brilliance of Kurasawa, Ozu, Naruse, Mizoguchi, Kinoshita etc. If you like Japanese films from the past, you owe it to yourself to watch Shimizu. I really liked this slow moving but compelling film.

Two blind masseurs, like birds, go to the north on Spring and to the South on Fall. They arrive in a small village on the mountains, where they meet a woman from Tokyo (Edokko) and one of them fall in love with the lady. The masseur is blind, but he understand that she has a mysterious past and he can't understand why she is there. At the Inn there is also a man from Tokyo with a boy about 7 years old, that spend fishing most of the day. After a couple of days the two Edokko feel comfortable to spend together most of the day. This is one of the best Shimuzu Hiroshi's movie and the characters are sweeter here than Ozu and Yamanka's movies. The initial and final sequences are very suggestive: you feel like you are in the movie! greatest experience.