The resident of a spa resort injures himself when he steps on a lost hairpin in one of the pools. After an exchange of letters, a lovely young woman turns up to apologise for the incident. The beginning of a brief romance.
Although the plot of Ornamental Hairpin seems like a bland even risible romance (its setting resembles one of Shimizu’s previous films titled The Masseurs and a Woman), its intuitive and modern mise-en-scène, stripped of everything superfluous, takes us by surprise from behind. JB
