School is starting soon and Junior (Lange Zambrano), a nine-year-old growing up in a tough Caracas tower block, needs money for the school photo. His curly hair is a problem too – the title translates as ‘Bad Hair’ - and he dreams of hair straighteners and products to remove the unruly curls. For his mother Marta (Samantha Castillo), her son’s hair is the least of her worries. She has lost her job due to an unspecified infraction and, with mounting bills, walks the streets hunting down her former boss in the hope of clemency.
With financial pressure and gritty realism at its beating heart, Mariana Rondón here is Vittorio De Sica by way of Ken Loach. It’s certainly grim down south but seen through the eyes of Junior, and his friend with Miss Venezuela dreams (Maria Emilia Sulbarán), the surrounding scenes of poverty don’t touch him.
This is a world where everything is upside down, everything is filtered through something else that results in a warped version of the original intent. Boys and girls play with dolls and toy soldiers together, but the game is about rape. Mum ensures that son sees her having sex because her doctor casually suggests that her son’s feyness is down to the fact that he doesn’t see how men and women are supposed to be together. The mural of the Virgin Mary brandishing a machine gun won’t be forgotten quickly.
There's a reversal of traditional gender roles – the effeminate Junior snaps at the photographer who wants to superimpose him onto a military backgrounds, and mum is a security guard. Junior’s grandmother (Ramos) lacks maternal instincts, offering only to look after Junior if Marta sells him to her so she can raise him herself, and perhaps have someone to take care of her when she’s elderly.
This different take on established roles extends to the mother-son relationship. Samuel Lange Zambrano and Samantha Castillo turn in remarkable performances and both bounce off each other in the tight confines of that tiny apartment. It’s never in doubt that Marta loves her son, but she’s tied to conventional attitude of masculinity (and perhaps the unspoken frustration that son is a constant reminder of his absent father) and she can cruelly lash out.
It can lose itself to repetition in the middle with Junior’s hair travails and Marta’s job seeking turning up the same results but it rallies towards the end.