Once Over

In a barbershop saturated with the scent of bay rum and the metallic rasp of straight razors, Jimmie—rubber-limbed, heart-struck—pinballs through escalating humiliations orchestrated by a tyrannical proprietor whose scissors click like castanets of doom. The manicurist, a porcelain-complexioned sylph named Virginia, polishes nails into mirrors that reflect Jimmie’s yearning back at him tenfold; each stroke of her emery board is a stanza of unspoken courtship. Ejected via boot, broom, and eventually a Rube-Goldberg contraption involving hot lather and a runaway revolving chair, Jimmie ricochets through the city’s gutters, alleys, and vaudeville houses, absorbing pratfalls like a masochist sponge. Yet every slam of the door echoes with the promise of return: he re-enters the shop disguised first as a hirsute swell, then as a barbering prodigy whose sleight-of-hand with a blade verges on the occult, sculpting lather into topiary busts of his beloved while shaving the clientele into stunned submission. The final reel pirouettes into a delirious waltz of mirrored stations: Virginia’s fingertips graze Jimmie’s lathered throat, the razor trembles, and the camera dollies through the glass into an iris-out that feels like a wedding ring dissolving into the cosmos.