In a quietly transfixing scene from the Venezuelan director Mariana Rondón's 'Bad Hair,' the camera gazes through the eyes of a 9-year-old, Junior (Samuel Lange), as he and a playmate (María Emilia Sulbarán) survey the teeming Caracas housing development across the street and make up stories about its residents. What they see in a giant building that resembles a dingy, crumbling factory is a social microcosm of the impoverished Venezuelan capital, where the threat of violence hangs in the air.
The children, who are eager to have their pictures taken for a school yearbook, want to look like the models and entertainers they see on television. The curly-headed Junior dreams of being a pop singer with a slick, shiny coiffure. His friend imagines herself as a skinny, tiara-crowned beauty contestant. Obsessed with his appearance, Junior continually inspects himself in the mirror and experiments with hair-straightening techniques, one of which involves a gooey mixture of mayonnaise and mashed avocado.
His beautiful but grim widowed mother, Marta (Samantha Castillo), works on and off as a security guard. She has all but given up hope of a better life and desperately tries to make ends meet while bringing up two children, of whom Junior is the older. Unlike Marta, Junior is still young enough to dream. And he watches with longing as his mother lavishes his baby brother with the kind of physical intimacy for which he yearns.
It is a daily struggle for the angry, determined Marta to find someone to look after the baby while she's at work and to make enough to pay for his day care. When she loses her job, she does what has to be done, even if it means sleeping with the boss who fired her in exchange for work.
This coolheaded neorealist movie doesn't waste time wringing its hands over the impoverished lives it observes or fretting about psychological quirks. Marta reads Junior's lack of interest in sports and obsession with his appearance as signs that he might be gay. Blaming herself for his supposed effeminacy, she drags him to a doctor, who pronounces him healthy but in need of male role models. Afterward, she forbids him to hang out with a friendly neighborhood teenager who runs a grocery stand.
Junior has a sympathetic champion in his indulgent paternal grandmother, Carmen (Nelly Ramos), who has a blow dryer and gives him grooming tips. In a metaphorically loaded scene, he is photographed curly-headed on one side and slick-haired on the other. The dueling hairstyles suggest an inner conflict between conformity and individuality in a restrictive environment. More than conveying ambiguous sexuality, they reflect the narrow range of self-expression in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, who at the time of the film was ailing but still alive.
Carmen makes Junior a foppish outfit that he despises because he thinks it looks like a dress. Already, he has begun to absorb the message that looking girlish is dangerous for a boy. Marta, in a foolhardy effort to teach him masculinity, leaves his bedroom door ajar so he can observe her having perfunctory, joyless sex with a manly role model. Watching from his bed, Junior turns away.
'Bad Hair' is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other's skin. The instinctive and volatile characters in this hard little gem of a film have no awareness of the boundary issues so dear to the hearts of contemporary therapists. They have neither the time nor the money for the luxury of intervention. They need all their resources merely to survive.
0 Comment "'Bad Hair,' a Venezuelan Drama With Mother"
Posting Komentar