Miss Bala
DIRECTED BY GERARDO NARANJO
In 2008, a newly crowned Mexican beauty queen made headlines for all the wrong reasons when she, along with seven underworld associates, was arrested in possession of a small arsenal and $53,000 in cash.
Director Gerardo Naranjo mines that incident as the inspiration for the brilliant Miss Bala, his fourth feature, and one of the best films of 2011. Rather than exploit the material’s abundantly pulpy potential, Naranjo and co-writer Mauricio Katz deliver a harrowing action thriller for the art-house set, which uses the scandal as a masterful metaphor for a profoundly corrupt society, mired in a devastating drug war. (The film’s title translates as “Miss Bullet,” and is an allusion to the narco-besieged border state of Baja California.)
Newcomer Stephanie Sigman is superb in the demanding role of Laura Guerrero, a young woman of modest means, with faint aspirations toward pageant stardom. Her head-spinning ordeal begins when a friend drags her to an audition, and then to a nightclub where the pair is caught in the crossfire as ruthless narcos gun down rivals and revelers alike. This sequence is terrifically tense, and establishes the tonal and technical template for all that follows. Naranjo presents the intricate scene in lengthy, uninterrupted takes, as he does each of the film’s several outstanding set pieces. In tandem with his tight framing of his lead, Naranjo’s protracted shots position the audience alongside Laura, who is soon swept up in a bloody, breathlessly improbable misadventure that remains too credible for comfort.
Though she escapes the shootout, a sinister development delivers her into the cartel’s clutches, where she falls under the thumb of a drug lord named Lino (Noe Hernandez). In a lesser film, this swarthy kingpin would have been portrayed as a rapacious, Manichean caricature, but Naranjo instills the pivotal role with a fascinating inscrutability, and, crucially, curbs the character’s lecherous advances. It’s a choice that speaks to the nuance in Miss Bala‘s social commentary; Laura initially responds to Lino with cowed passivity, but his unexpected restraint brings the question of her complicity in the gang’s undertakings increasingly to the fore.
This is all the more true after the surreal, fabulously ironic interlude in which Laura’s cartel connections secure her crown. The moment precedes a key shift in the character’s motivations, during which Naranjo makes plain that ordinary Mexicans are the victims in the ongoing cross-border drug battles, but also pointedly refuses to assert their innocence.