Nine year old Junior (Samuel Lange) wants nothing more than to straighten his curls so he can look like a singer in his elementary school picture. Whenever his mother Marta (Samantha Castillo) is away, he sneaks into the bathroom and attempts to “fix” his hair with everything from mayonnaise to oil. Marta, who is dealing with the death of her husband and the complications of having to raise two children on her own, sees Junior’s suspicious activities as a sign of his latent homosexuality and tries to show him the right way at all costs.
Written and directed by Mariana Rondón, “Bad Hair” is a complex, often heartbreaking coming of age tale, set against the backdrop of the Caracas’ projects; a place where life and death coexist in a truly perverse way (gunshots are heard throughout the film and some of the characters mention how they’re an expected sound). Rondón is a wonderful storyteller who allows her characters (and the actors playing them) to carve their own unique paths in the world she delineates for them. As such, we see Junior’s obsession through his innocent eyes, Marta’s fear through her take as a single woman who might have lost her husband to those very anonymous gunshots that echo through the night, and we also meet Junior’s grandmother Carmen (Nelly Ramos), a pragmatic woman who sees things for what they are and finds opportunity where Marta only sees pain.
The film paints an especially complex portrait of gender norms in Latin America; Marta works as a security guard and a harrowing subplot involves her practically selling her body to her boss in order to gain a position, giving Rondón the opportunity to play around with the terrible dichotomy between what is expected of women in society and how they often subvert the “rules” in order to feed their families. If “Bad Hair” wasn’t already a great movie about growing up and finding your identity, the director also interweaves a strong political message that leads to a chilling finale, making us realize how the Venezuelan government has turned freedom of expression into the one enemy that must be crushed.
