Corte de cabelo: how soon is now

Abstract

[Excerpt] In Corte de Cabelo, the narrative is built around the characters’ impulses — because impulses are what the "lm is about — which are like emotional spasms, sudden movements that not only make up and tell, at each moment, a story, but that also end up dening the very spaces they are happening in. As if inhabiting a space were, for these characters, inventing that space, and saying again what had already been said but in a new way, free from all historic or cultural tethers. The paradigmatic scene of this invention is the moment the mattress arrives at the newlyweds’ #at. Excited, Rita and Paulo get intimate inside the mattress’s plastic cover, turning it into a sort of cocoon. Inside of it the perception of the outside becomes diffuse, almost inexistent, and on the brink of asphyxia, the couple seems to want, at the same time, to forge and to question their domesticity, their place, their intimacy. Like a second skin, this love bubble replaces the surrounding #at, the surrounding city, and transforms — much like the experiences of the architectural vanguards of the 1960s and 1970s — into an environment that is both relativized and totalizing: All are architects, everything is Architecture, Hans Hollein stated in 19682. Unlike the Amoreiras, where Rita works, unlike its (even if not immediately apparent) exuberance and joyfulness, the space created in that split second, inside that ever changing and fragile wrapping "lm, de"nes what is perhaps the moment of maximum awareness of the couple, and maybe also of the political, social and geographical context in which the "lm operates and positions itself. Without any measurable or recognizable references, in that moment, there is only warmth and touch. [...]