An exceptional performance by Samantha Castillo as a single mother struggling to balance childcare with employment in the unforgiving housing projects of Caracas drives this powerful yet playful domestic drama from writer/director Mariana Rondón. Recently widowed, Marta (Castillo) finds herself falling out of love with nine-year-old Junior, the misfit son whose anti-macho obsession with straightening his curly hair provokes anguish and anger about his putative sexuality. While news footage tells of fellow Venezuelans shaving their heads and murdering their mothers as Hugo Chávez’s health fails, Marta and Junior (Samuel Lange, brilliantly cast) undergo their own personal crises in the pressure-cooker environment of a teeming high-rise, a place where otherness is shunned. Contrasting the innocent strains of Henry Stephen’s touchstone song Limón, Limonero with cacophonous urban street sound, Rondón turns a deceptively simple coming-of-age tale into a vibrant treatise upon a raft of disparate issues (fatherless matriarchy, gender stereotyping, social deprivation, physical desire) with authenticity, integrity and, perhaps most impressively, a transcendent sense of levity.
