Marta (Samantha Castillo) is by training a security guard living in a flat with her two sons on the ragged outskirts of Caracas. She is trying to get her job back and has had enough of cleaning rich people's homes.
The father of her two sons - the youngest a mere babe in arms - appears to have died in tragic circumstances, the indications suggest he was a victim of gangs or drugs. The late man's mother, Carmen (Nelly Ramos), keeps a shrine to her son - two lit candles in front of his photographic portrait - in her flat.
Marta can no longer afford the babysitter, who seems to be involved in mind-spirit therapy to deal with problems of over-eating. One scene reveals a group of women sitting cross-legged on her floor chanting: "I am not hungry."
When she needs to enquire about getting her job back, Marta has no choice but to leave her sons with Carmen - a bad move indeed. The possessive, manipulative grandmother insists on feminising the eldest of her two grandsons, nine-year-old Junior (Samuel Lange) by teaching him a dreadfully cloying pop song and dressing him in a Little Richard-style suit.
Eventually he rebels and tells her he doesn't want to wear a dress. However, he is obsessed with straightening his hair - Pelo Malo translates as 'Bad Hair' - and wants to look like the pop singer Carmen grooms him to imitate.
Weaving in and out of Pelo Malo, there is the sense of the supernatural, of voodoo, of ancient belief surviving. On the TV news, we see people shaving their heads in some kind of ritualistic collective bid to save the ailing President Chavez. Another bulletin informs us that a man has shot his mother dead, in the firm belief that it will save the president's life.
Caracas, the city in which the film is set, impinges little, only seen in its exteriors, as great rivers of traffic, or in ugly, run-down tower blocks. There is nothing pretty about this story and what we see is mostly the grim interior of the flats concerned and the even grimmer lives eked out within.
Yet, almost by stealth, Pelo Malo appears to tell us an awful lot about what it means to be poor and vulnerable in modern-day Venezuela. In Spanish with English subtitles, Pelo Malo is released exclusively at the IFI.
Paddy Kehoe
