Touch

Sort of a Chinese take on "Fatal Attraction," "Touch" combines Eastern and Western takes on eroticism in this tale of a rich woman who takes a blind masseuse as her lover.

I’m making a world map of your body.

So says Bai Yu (Yuan Jiangwei), a blind young masseuse in the erotic thriller “Touch.” He says this while smelling various body parts of his new lover, Fei Fei, a Caucasian woman who’s been living in China for the past 15 years. She is a typical rich wife of a successful businessman, Zhang Hua (Yang Jun), who ignores and belittles her, and so she turns to this seemingly harmless man-boy to satisfy her desires.

Blind since childhood, Bai Yu has a highly developed sense of smell and touch, and can tell what color lipstick Fei Fei is wearing just by the scent of roses. He can also tell everything about a person’s health and mental state just by touching their feet, even if a woman is pregnant… which will be come important later.

Fei Fei is played by Aleksandra Szczepanowska, a Polish-American actress who also makes her debut as a writer and director with “Touch.” Supposedly this is the first independent film shot in China by a Western woman. The result is a curious mix of Eastern and Western approaches to eroticism. The Chinese version is more based on mood and oblique views of the human body, while us repressed Westerners tend to be more voyeurs.

Thus I found some of the love scenes stubbornly coy, Fei Fei often undressed but the camera framed so as not to expose her body (with one notable exception), while Bai Yu is treated almost like an androgynous doll, right down to his unattractive, asexual haircut that looks like they stuck a bowl on his head. It’s a beautifully shot film, with subtle colors and backgrounds.

Roughly speaking, the first third of the movie covers Fei Fei’s growing dissatisfaction with her husband, the middle section is the torrid romance with Bai Yu, and in the last act she and Zhang Hua grow closer again and Bai Yu, now feeling rejected, exhibits increasing disturbing and violent behavior. It’s basically the same structure as “Fatal Attraction.”

Fei Fei first enters a massage parlor to relieve her stress after seeing Bai Yu in the park, standing directly in front of her without seeing as if silently calling to her. She requests “Number 89,” his only identity at the parlor, and for a while this is how he is known to her. Such sessions are rather public by American standards, with client keeping their clothes on and separated from others only by a semi-transparent curtain. No hankie-pankie will go on here.

But they find a way to increase the intensity of their touches, and during the second session Bai Yu inserts a finger into Fei Fei’s mouth — a simple gesture that somehow becomes extremely intimate and penetrating. Soon they move their sessions to his apartment, and drop the pretense of just needing work out her knots.

Zhang Hua remains a mystery for most of the first half, always leaving or coming back from business trips, and gambling with his buddies inside their house late into the night even when he’s home. Fei Fei has been trying to obtain permanent residency in China after having to renew her visa for many years, and feels like a tourist in the country she thinks of as home — and that her husband does seem too concerned about the languishing process.

They have an adorable son, Mo Mo (Beckhan), who’s about to start school, and Zhang Hua is worried that Mo Mo’s long hair will make him seem like a girl and be bullied. Fei Fei clings tenaciously to her son, pampering and protecting him, and it seems clear that her tendency toward obsessive relationships did not start with Bai Yu.

There’s some things to like about “Touch,” the tale of a Western woman trying to assimilate into the complexities of Chinese culture and often coming up short. Having an affair with a servant (as her husband would see him) is a very European thing to do, though the way it goes south and spurns psychopathic impulses seems very American.