The Body Won't Close

Besouro Mangangá was a capoeira player from Bahia. In songs and legends, he is being remembered as a black hero who magically 'closed' his body so as to become invincible. No bullets, no knives no daggers could pierce his skin. Besouro died when his enemies discovered his weak spot: the sexual act would revoke all the magic performed on his body and leave it wide open Tales about doomed heroes and failed magic are found the world over. They highlight the porosity and vulnerability of the human body and cast this condition in a tragic light: we need to shield ourselves to shut out the evils of the world, but the body won’t close. In Santo Amaro, the small town where Besouro lived and died, ‘closing’ one’s body is part and parcel of the process through which bodies become masculine. The filmmaker engages a number of men to discuss what is to be gained by closing one’s body – as well as what it costs -- and how these practices make sense in the precarious and violent lifeworld they inhabit. Soon, however, the filmmaker realizes that his topic cannot be neatly kept on the side of his Bahian interlocutors. As he finds himself drawn into these intimate conversations, he is forced to consider the intricate ways in which his own body has been trained to shut the world out and let the world in.

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