Junior\u2019s mother, Marta, is a single mother of two who lives with the persistent burden of having to support Junior and his nine-month old brother\u2014an acute anxiety that is only compounded by the fact that she was recently laid off from her job as a security guard for reasons not mentioned.\u00a0 Somewhat traditional and overwhelmed with her parental duties, Marta makes no secret of her impatience with Junior\u2019s effeminate behavior\u2014rejecting his desire to become a straight-haired pop singer with a weary and undisguised volatility.\u00a0 Luckily, Junior finds support and solace through his paternal grandmother\u2014who indulges his eccentric fixations by giving him the opportunity to express himself as he pleases.\u00a0 It is Junior\u2019s grandmother who utters the beginning quote to Marta; expressing relief that her grandson\u2019s interests will deter him from a life of gang violence and crime (not to mention that she is more than thrilled to have a kindred companion during her lonely golden years).<\/p>\n Bad Hair<\/i> paints an especially complex portrait of gender norms in Latin America: with a subplot involving Marta practically prostituting herself to her boss in order to reclaim her job, Rondon is seizing the opportunity to depict the terrible dichotomy between what is expected of women and how they often subvert these norms to provide for their family.\u00a0 In fact, the most interesting aspect of Marta\u2019s character is how she harbors a very rigid and traditional attitude towards gender norms and codes of conduct, yet she works as a security guard, which doesn\u2019t seem to be a very conventional job for a woman.\u00a0 \u201cMarta is asking Junior to mask his femininity like she had to.\u00a0 She wants him to be tough as a mechanism of survival.\u00a0 In fact, I call the three main characters [mother, son, grandmother] the triangle of power, because each one is trying to survive in their own way, and unfortunately Junior gets caught in a tough balancing act of pleasing both\u201d, noted Rondon as I sat down with her to discuss the film.\u00a0 \u201cBut\u201d, I reply, \u201cit seems like no matter what he turns to\u2014whether it is a gun or a hair dryer\u2014there is going to be danger for Junior so long as he continues to live in the homophobic and violently machismo environment of the Venezuelan slums.\u00a0 Would you agree?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cAbsolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n There is an organic confidence in the way Rondon captures Junior\u2019s embryonic sexual curiosity in the context of his environment\u2014there\u2019s one scene that remarkably captures these instinctual desires in which Junior eyes the male kiosk vendor with a sense of innocent enamor.\u00a0 Filmed on location with a hand-held camera, the tightly bound exterior compositions are shot with an intense intimacy that makes the streets of Caracas feel like a breathing organism trapped within the confines of poverty and potent social anxieties.\u00a0 With an aesthetic technique that borders on neo-realism, the film chronicles Junior\u2019s plight through a passively objective lens\u2014as though we are unbiased voyeurs witnessing the story unfold within a dilapidated landscape.\u00a0 Observing her characters with an unflinching sense of detachment, Rondon approaches the narrative through a gaze that is as resilient as her characters, resulting in a mise-en-scene that mirrors the calloused grit of the film.\u00a0 Samuel Lange plays Junior with a delicate authenticity that\u2019s wonderful to watch, but a great deal of admiration must be directed towards Samantha Castillo; who makes you love her performance of Marta as much as you hate her character.\u00a0 Making her acting debut in film, Castillo plays Marta with an omnipresent, thinly veiled anger that reflects the unsettling, persistent anxiety within the film.<\/p>\n While Bad Hair\u2019s socio-cultural criticisms and portrayal of adolescent malady could have been more tightly aligned and incorporated with a bit more refinement, Mariana Rondon\u2019s enthralling film nonetheless beautifully illustrates how one boy\u2019s pre-sexual queer awakening can both conflict with societal conventions, yet also serve as an escape from a rapidly disintegrating world.\u00a0 The film provides a textured backdrop of our characters\u2019 unaccommodating environment, which nicely parallels the friction between mother and son.\u00a0 So why use hair?\u00a0 \u201cI wanted to start with the superficial, and go deep.\u00a0 That mirror becomes more of a window of how you identify and accept both yourself and the other\u201d, adds Rondon.\u00a0<\/i>\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIs it better to comb your hair than to want to play with guns?\u201d\u00a0 In many ways, this question captures the essence of Mariana Rondon\u2019s raw and multi-layered Venezuelan drama Bad Hair (Pelo Malo).\u00a0 Set within the over-populated housing projects of Caracas, Bad Hair observes a young boy, Junior (featured), whose constant obsession with straightening\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2065],"tags":[792,487,1963,486,39,81,793,189,134,38,784],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-3864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-bad-hair","tag-demi-kampakis","tag-film","tag-film-review","tag-gay","tag-lgbtq","tag-mariana-rondon","tag-posture-mag","tag-posture-magazine","tag-queer","tag-tribeca-film-festival","post_format-post-format-image"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/feature2.jpg?fit=1300%2C731","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6QBV8-10k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3864"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11219,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3864\/revisions\/11219"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3864"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=3864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Junior](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/posturemag.com\/online\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/grandmother.jpg\")
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