Pelo
Malo/Bad Hair
***
Dir: Mariana Rondón. With: Samuel Lange
Zambrano, Samantha Castillo, Beto Benites. 93 mins. Cert: 15
This breakthrough
drama from Venezuelan writer-director Mariana Rondón starts small – sketching a
somewhat tetchy, resentful relationship between a single mother and her
nine-year-old son in latter-day Caracas – and gradually builds an idea of a
society constructed along restrictively gendered lines. Both main characters
are brushing against the grain: mama Marta (the excellent Samantha Castillo)
quitting menial cleaning work to try out as a security guard, Junior (Samuel
Lange Zambrano) struggling to straighten the unruly moptop he inherited from
his macho deceased dad and become a singer. (He’s a little like the
crossdressing hero of 1997’s French crowdpleaser Ma Vie en Rose.) Rondón charts
their progress in unemphatic slices of life, just playful enough for the whole
not to feel like a tract: a pre-teen female neighbour’s gabby obsession with
rape – funny, but with a chilly undertone – is typical of a quietly perceptive
work that teases out insights without undue strain.
Pelo Malo/Bad Hair opens in selected cinemas from today.
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