Stalled Growth in Rapado

Coupled with an ever fruitful literary scene, Argentina also boasts one of Latin America's most celebrated film industries. Most recently spearheaded by films like Wild Tales and The Secret in Their Eyes, many overlook the work done by early auteurs such as Martin Rejtman, one of a number of 90s filmmakers who birthed New Wave Argentine Cinema.

In this three-part retrospective, I'll be exploring three of Rejtman's biggest features.

From stolen motorbikes to counterfeit banknotes, Martin Rejtman’s early work, Rapado, is a story made up of a series of key motifs. It is the culmination of all these recurring elements that makes for a raw reprisal of the European bildungsroman - or coming-of-age story.

Released in 1992, Argentine film critics today often celebrate Rejtman’s Rapado as the dawn of New Argentine Cinema - an artistic movement that championed cultural inclusivity and cinematic realism at a time when national identity was rapidly changing.

Following years of martial law, democratic freedoms were only restored in the early 1980s, around 10 years prior to the release of Rapado. This new wave of Argentinian cinema was spearheaded by a number of emerging, fresh-out-of-college auteurs, all of whom were keen to make their mark on the country’s changing cultural landscape.

Buenos Aires-born Rejtman was around thirty years old when Rapado hit the screens. As much of a reflection on overarching themes such as liberty, morality and justice, Rejtman’s narrative also explores subtler topics such as the responsibilities of growing up, the loss of innocence, social alienation and the masculine identity.

The film begins with our protagonist Lucio (played superbly by Ezequiel Cavia) giving someone a lift through the quiet streets of downtown Buenos Aires on his motorbike. There is no immediate indication of what their relationship is, but it soon becomes the central focus of the entire story. Stopping at a red light, Lucio’s passenger puts a knife against his throat and takes his bike and everything on his person – including his shoes.

Director, Martin Rejtman

Undaunted and undeterred as ever, Lucio walks over to his friend’s house to claim a spare pair of shoes. At one point, he’s given a cigarette by another young man called Gustavo, but it turns out neither of them have a lighter, so they just stand in silence while they wait for a bus. For me, this sequence perfectly sets the tone for the entire narrative.

Lucio’s misfortunes at the beginning of the film completely subvert what could have easily been a slick film about fast-paced biker kids. Instead, what we’re left with is a road movie without a car, a coming-of-age story without an expressive protagonist, a cigarette without a lighter. Yet, this opening sequence doesn’t truly quash anything, it acts as the incentive for Rejtman’s various explorations into what it’s like to grow up in a place paralysed by the inadequacies of the past and hesitant about the uncertainty of the future.

Rapado

The film’s title refers to the moment after the theft where Lucio wanders into a barber shop and spontaneously decides to get his head shaved. In English, the film’s title means shaved head, but the Spanish is also keenly reminiscent of the word Rapido, meaning fast or quick.

This play-on-words is by no means accidental. A film centred around the importance of a motorbike in Lucio’s life, or lack thereof, the story is actually very slow with many scenes of our protagonist and other young men wandering both listless and detached through the streets of Buenos Aires. However, with a running time of just over 70 minutes, there is a strange contrast in that the film, like the recurring motif of the bikes, is very quick.

On the whole, this juxtaposition perfectly reflects Lucio’s predicament and his overall attitude towards life. Also, in Lucio’s failure to portray his thoughts and feelings to the viewer, it is contrasts such as this that do so instead. Significantly, Rapado is a work of subtleties where messages are communicated in new, innovative ways. Rejtman retreats from standard techniques of character development and instead pursues fresh, intuitive methods where characters communicate not necessarily with one another, but with the world around them.

The Trials of Morality

Grand themes of morality and justice lie at the core of the Rejtman’s narrative. Lucio, a young man slowly making sense of a world where the lines between right and wrong are often blurred, quickly becomes aware that this is indeed a dog-eat-dog world where the victors are often crooks in disguise.

Penniless, apathetic and indifferent, Lucio quickly resorts to the very thing that left him in the predicament where we find him – theft. On numerous, separate occasions, both him and his friend go to great lengths to steal bikes for themselves. At one point, Lucio’s friend even attempts to steal a bike in the same way that Lucio got his stolen in the first place, but instead of getting the bike he gets thrown on the ground and beaten – a familiar trope of Rejtman’s comic, deadpan style.

Navigating a city that is both uncaring and indifferent to his plights, without his bike, Lucio finds himself in unfamiliar urban environment where counterfeit banknotes are everywhere in circulation and many characters seem to want to be anywhere else but Buenos Aires.

In many ways, the film is modest, unassuming subversion of the European coming-of-age story. Lucio is forced to understand that overcoming the trials of his adolescence requires much more than simply imposing the same trials on others. Regarding the characters he meets, it often feels like Lucio is coming up against different variations of his own self. Ultimately, however, it is up to him how he navigates his way through these turbulent times and finds a liberating solution to his own restlessness.

The New Bildungsroman

As I touched on earlier, beneath the story’s overarching themes, Rapado is a radical rethinking of the conventional Europeanised bildungsroman, and the challenges that our protagonist faces are invariably Latin American.

Generally speaking, unlike some European coming-of-age stories that tend to focus on characters interacting with the juvenile conventions of the western world, Rapado explores the way young men engage with a society where culture is constantly changing and the powers-that-be that are often not to be trusted. The world that Rejtman builds in the film is in no way a playground for our young protagonist – it’s an unforgiving environment where crime and poverty is conveyed through the auteur’s various melancholic, deadpan techniques.

In the film, Lucio’s bike is so much more than a means of getting around, his friend even calls it “his life”. Afterall, the bike is a well-known symbol of pride, power and masculine freedom, and without it, Lucio is merely treading water, his whole identity is thrown off kilter.

When Lucio finally steals a bike from a young woman who leaves it unattended while she disappears into a shop, we find out that Lucio plans to escape Buenos Aires once and for all. Finally, the road movie that Rapado always could have been starts to come to fruition. Yet, free on the pampas outside the city, Lucio’s bike breaks down, leaving our protagonist on the side of the road waiting for a lift back to Buenos Aires.

Having enacted the same crime that happened to him at the beginning of the story, Lucio learns that being a victor in a dog-eat-dog world is not fool proof – it’s dangerous and unfulfilling, a merry-go-round of inadequacy and delinquency.

Back in the city, Lucio sleeps at Gustavo’s house. At breakfast, Gustavo’s mum asks him whether he’d like some more coffee. Gustavo stops her and says, ‘He can help himself’, to which Lucio responds, ‘I can help myself.’

The film fittingly ends with Lucio waiting at a bus stop – a liminal, temporary space where he is neither a pedestrian nor a biker. His destination, as ever, is unknown, but as viewers we are left with the optimism that the only person who can help Lucio is Lucio himself – he is on the right road.