Full Body Massage is a 1995 made-for-television film directed by Nicolas Roeg.
Nina (Mimi Rogers) is a rich art gallery owner, rich enough to have a lavish house with a jacuzzi and to have masseurs make house calls. In fact, she has a regular appointment with a masseur named Douglas, an appointment that has evolved into a sexual relationship.
So she's surprised one day when Douglas doesn't show, and in fact a different masseur named Fitch (Bryan Brown) shows up at her door. Fitch doesn't know that Douglas regularly gives Nina happy endings (although he eventually figures it out) and certainly has no interest in giving one himself. Instead, he gives her a thorough but professional massage that eventually turns into a therapy session. Fitch grills Nina on her materialism and her inability to open up emotionally, while at the same time extending the wonders of New Age medicine and crystals. Nina gives as good as she gets, poking holes in Fitch's New Age "oogie boogie bullshit" while wondering why Fitch has lived a rootless existence, and asking about his old girlfriend Alice, The One That Got Away.
Tropes:
- And the Adventure Continues: The movie ends with Nina making an appointment with Fitch to come back next week.
- Answer Cut: Subverted. Fitch eventually mentions an old girlfriend, and Nina asks "So what happened to her?" Cut to Fitch, at what appears to be the top of a ravine, looking on with a horrified expression—but the movie cuts away. It's not until near the end when it's revealed that he was looking at the scene of the fatal car crash that killed Alice.
- Bathtub Scene: Outdoors, with flashbacks of Fitch and Alice bathing in a natural outdoor pond.
- Book Ends: The opening scene shows Nina driving home from work (and to her massage appointment). The last scene is Fitch driving away after the massage.
- Closet Gay: Douglas has regularly been massaging Nina to orgasm, which is why she's surprised when Fitch offhandedly mentions that Douglas is gay.
- Erotic Film: An entire movie in which a mostly naked Nina gets the eponymous full body massage, as well as flashbacks to Nina's happy ending massages with Douglas and Fitch in bed with his beautiful girlfriend.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Close to Real Time, but there are obvious short skips here and there. In any event, it's only a couple of hours, time for a single massage session.
- Flashback: Many, including flashbacks from Nina's youth and her ill-advised marriage to an art professor, as well as her orgasmic massage sessions with Douglas, and Fitch's youth in Australia and his own relationship with Alice.
- Happy-Ending Massage: A very rare female example of this. It's clear from the beginning that there's a sexual component to Nina's massages from Douglas. Right around the time that he's shown pinching her nipples, an embarrassed Nina admits that Douglas gets her off by touching, but they don't have intercourse.
- Magical Native American: Discussed Trope. Fitch the new age hippie says that Western medicine was BS and that the Hopi of New Mexico can heal with crystals and a touch. This is accompanied with a flashback of Alice going through some sort of Hopi ritual. (At the end there is a shot of a Hopi, in full native regalia, standing vigil at Alice's funeral. Believe it or not.)
- Match Cut: Several, as the film cuts from Fitch giving Nina a massage to Nina getting one from Douglas, or Fitch administering one to Alice. One scene cuts from Fitch pouring massage oil from a bottle, to Douglas pouring champagne from a glass.
- Ms. Fanservice: Mimi Rogers, everybody, who spends the bulk of the movie naked and for most of the rest is in her underwear or a towel.
- Gabriella Hall plays the younger Nina.... tropers familiar with Ms. Hall's work will be unsurprised to learn she's frequently unclothed in the flashbacks.
- New Age: Fitch is a big believer in New Age nonsense. He blathers on about how Western medicine is just a different form of religion, and that he has seen the Hopi cure with "crystals and a touch". He stages crystals around Alice, he also uses magnets, and he drapes her in colored towels because apparently the colors of the towels have some sort of specific influence.
- Offscreen Crash: Much of the dialogue in the flashbacks between Fitch and Alice imply that she's The One That Got Away. It's not until the end that the film reveals what really happened. Alice drives past the camera on a dirt road, cue offscreen crash noise. Cut to Fitch staring in horror, cut to Alice smashed into a tree, dead.
- Rom Com Job: It's not a romcom, but...Nina owns an art gallery, her old boyfriend is a painter, Fitch is a masseur and his old girlfriend Alice was an aspiring singer.
- Sexophone: When Douglas in a flashback starts fondling Nina's breasts in a most unprofessional way, and then starts stimulating her nipples (it's a Happy-Ending Massage), a saxophone plays over the soundtrack.
- Speech-Centric Work: Speech and nudity, really. Over the course of a single massage session, Fitch and Nina talk about love, past relationships, art, spiritualism vs. Western medicine, and the differences between men and women.
- Time-Shifted Actor: A young actor plays 18-year-old Fitch in a couple of his flashbacks, including a scene where young Fitch is humiliated by his judgmental father. Gabriella Hall, a star of late-night cable T&A movies in the '90s, appears as college-age Nina.
