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Movie Review

‘Bad Hair’: A tangled story of life in a Venezuelan slum

Junior (Samuel Lange) stars in “Bad Hair,” which touches on race, class, and gender.FIGA FILMS/FiGa Films

Both the title and premise of Venezuelan director Mariana Rondón’s artful, wrenching fable suggest the kind of whimsical and didactic socially conscious movies of ABC’s old after-school specials. Even the characters’ names seem namby-pamby. Junior (Samuel Lange), a beatific-looking 9-year-old living in poverty with his infant brother and harried mother in a Caracas slum, wants to get his curly hair straightened for his school picture. His mother, Marta (Samantha Castillo), thinks this obsession means he’s gay. Sounds like a teaching moment for everyone.

But it doesn’t take long for “Bad Hair” to show a few kinks of its own. The problems go beyond a simple case of a confused mom coming to grips with the confused sexuality of a rebellious kid, nor will all be resolved with the inevitable reconciliations and lessons learned. Instead Rondón slips in issues of race (Junior’s father was black), gender (Marta’s status as an unemployed single mother), and class (the ubiquitous ostracism of the poor).

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Like the children’s films of Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, “Bad Hair” explores such social pathology, in part, in the guise of a kids’ movie. But it also takes on the intensity of more pointed films such as “Bicycle Thieves” (1948) and even Hector Babenco’s sensationalistic “Pixote” (1981).

Rondón, however, doesn’t resort to Babenco’s outrage, letting awareness sneak in, as if from the limited point of view of Junior. In the opening scene Junior and Marta enter a luxury apartment. They make themselves at home — Junior jumps into the Jacuzzi — and it is assumed they live there. Then the real owner enters, expresses outrage at the boy in her tub, and it becomes clear that Marta is a cleaning woman — and that she’s lost another job.

She might also be losing her son. She’s disturbed not just by the hair but by his singing and his hanging around the hunky teenager who runs the corner newsstand. Carmen (Nelly Ramos), her late husband’s mother, encourages Junior in his distressing behavior. She also offers Marta money if she lets her adopt him. Marta is tempted, but the offer stirs up memories that are never specified, but hover like the film’s abiding tone of free-floating dread. How did Junior’s father die? What is it about Carmen’s neighborhood that Marta fears?

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Much lies below the surface, and that surface consists in part of on-location shooting of urban desolation that is taken for granted as the characters’ lot in life. In one scene Junior and a friend sit on a balcony and gaze at the vast, dilapidated apartment block next door, the mirror of the one they live in, and speculate, “Rear Window”-like, about the people living in them. “Do you think they are having more fun than us?” Junior asks. Such is a typical “Bad Hair” day.

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Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.