Rapado
(Rapado)

“Lucio makes a sudden decision: he goes into the barber’s – it is six thirty in the afternoon, almost summer – and he decides to get a shave”. So begins Rapado (literally, “shaved”), a short story by Martín Rejtman written the same year that he made his debut feature film with the same title. Opening with the night-time theft of Lucio’s motorbike, which obsesses him to the point that he in turn tries to steal one, Martín Rejtman’s film does not come across as an adaptation. Far from minimalist, the structure of Rapado is more serial-like, playing on the same motifs to the point of exhaustion, in a tone that is as gentle as it is strange, melancholically comical and conveying a state of crisis without attempting to make a strictly social statement. As the filmmaker confessed “Rapado is a film that talks about economy in all senses of the term.” CA