Bad Hair (2014) - Mariana Rondon

Junior is a nine year old boy living in the slums of Venezeuela with his single mother, Marta.  Junior doesn't have the same typical interests as most boys his age, dreaming of being a fashionable pop signer with long, beautiful hair.  This infatuation drives his mother crazy, who begins to be fearful that her son may be a homosexual.  Mariana Rondon's Bad Hair is a intimate and unique study of young boy living in a culture that refuses to except him.  Junior is not cognizant enough to understand his sexual preferences but his mother recognizes the signs, growing increasingly agitated by Junior's fixation with his hair and looks in general.  Bad Hair is not an easy film to experience, with Marta being a volatile but sympathetic mother whose trying and failing to make things work.  Jobless and a single mother, Marta desperately tries to support Junior and his baby brother, failing far more than she succeeds, with Bad Hair capturing the struggle that life has dealt her.  As a matter of fact, Bad Hair is as much a study of urban desolation and decay as it is about homosexuality, displaying a vital portrait of the delapitated high-rise apartments where so many poverty-striken people live.  Bad Hair's cinematography is subtlely brilliant, routinely shooting Junior and Marta from low angles, having these large, decaying structures hang over these characters, as a reminder of how restricted they are economically, trapped in this world.  The film captures the poverty, dispair, and violence that make up the world of these characters live-in, which is also the main reason why Marta is so terrified on Junior's budding homosexuality.  Doing so in a subtle way, Bad Hair slowly reveals Marta's true reasoning for being fearful of Junior's homexuality has nothing to do with morals or religion but instead life itself, fearing for her son's life in a mean-spirited world.  Anchored by two impressive lead performances, Bad Hair is a story about characters attempting to find themselves and make peace with what life has given them.  

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