‘Un Varón’ (‘A Male’) Review: A Young Boy Aches to Avoid Becoming a Hardened Man in Colombian Christmas Tale

variety.com:

Manuel Betancourt The toxicity of patriarchal masculinity has become such a well-worn trope in pop culture (and especially in recent Colombian cinema) that it’s hard to remember its effects continue unabated in streets and households all over the world, and in that Latin American country specifically.

And so, while Fabián Hernández’s central concerns in his simply-titled film, “A Man” (“Un Varón”), are all too familiar, his tale of a young man living in a shelter in the center of Bogotá who cannot escape the violence of the world of the streets around him, emerges nonetheless as a powerful portrait of the country’s inescapable machismo.

When Carlos (Dilan Felipe Ramírez Espitia) sits down to get a haircut, he has only one request: He wants one fit for a “varón.” Yet the English translation (“a man”) doesn’t quite capture the specificity of such a word in Colombian slang, for “varón” carries with it connotations of strength and strictness, of a kind of virility that straddles the line between being a “gentleman” and a “baller.” When we next see him, with his hair close-shaven in parts, a rat tail behind him, and angular fades further complementing the stripes he razors off his own eyebrows, his masculine cut feels as artificially produced as the toughened persona he’s called to present on any given day.

Carlos lives in a world that demands he be tough. It’s how he earns respect in the youth shelter he lives in (that is when he can abide by its rules) and how he nurtures not so much friendships as alliances with similarly toughened young boys who see any problem as possibly solved with guns, fists, whores, drinks or drugs.