Pelo Malo (Bad Hair) review: Straight and narrow

Pelo malo (Bad Hair)
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Director: Mariana Rondón
Cert: Club
Genre: Drama
Starring: Samuel Lange Zambrano, Samantha Castillo, Beto Benites, Nelly Ramos, María Emilia Sulbarán
Running Time: 1 hr 33 mins

This award-winning Venezuelan drama concerns a warring mother and son who live in a vast and tatty Caracas apartment sprawl. As Mariana Rondón’s starkly neo-realist feature opens, Marta (Samantha Castillo) has lost her job as a security guard and is reduced to cleaning bathrooms.

Her imaginative nine-year-old son, Junior (Samuel Lange), harbours a small dream: to get his ID picture taken for school, preferably with his unruly hair smoothed into the kind of slick he sees on his grandma’s favourite pop-stars.

Unhappily, his cash-strapped mother is in no position to pay for a photograph. And besides, she’s becoming increasingly concerned with her offspring’s behaviour: his BF is a girl, his dance moves are eccentric, his pre-sexual fascination with a handsome newspaper vendor (Julio Méndez) is ‘off’.

Marta consults a doctor about her son and Grandma doesn’t help when she fashions a flamboyant outfit for Junior inspired by the 1960s Venezuelan pop singer. A despairing Marta intervenes by taking her former boss home and having sex where Junior can see them. Ew. Ew. Ew.

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Pelo Malo's grim trajectory leaves the viewer longing for the comparatively enlightened wire-hangar beatings of Mommy Dearest.

A brilliant cast improvise and workshop around a screenplay that Rondón wouldn’t let them see.

Rondón has plenty of important and harsh things to say about social constructs, hypocrisy and maternal tough love. But a child being twisted toward conformity does not make for easy viewing.

Tara Brady

Tara Brady

Tara Brady, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and film critic