Dir: Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 2011, 113 mins, Spanish with English subtitles
Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Noe Hernández, James Russo, José Yenque
Review by Kevin Gill
The elevator pitch for the Mexican film Miss Bala might go something along the lines of “a thriller depicting three days in the life of an aspiring beauty queen who unwillingly gets caught up in the activities of a violent criminal gang.” If this suggests pacey, frivolous fun with splashings of sexploitation then it could not be more misleading – Gerardo Naranjo’s film is a deeply moral and urgent dramatic treatment of daily reality in Mexico ‘s brutal northern badlands, told with devastating and at times documentary-like immediacy and no small amount of understated flair.
Top of the director’s agenda for social exposé is to show the extent of how the drug cartels of the region are embedded in the fabric of society – and how their brutal activity breeds widespread fear and corruption, and affects the lives of normal people. No-one in Miss Bala bears the brunt of this pitiful dynamic more than its central character Laura (Sigman), a young clothes seller, who one day is dreaming of being crowned state beauty queen in order to provide a better life for her father and young brother and the next is intimidated into dropping off three dead bodies, including that of a murdered DEA agent, outside the American Embassy.
If this sequence of events seems unlikely, Naranjo presents it as anything but. Laura is simply unlucky enough to witness a massacre carried out by a drugs cartel at a local nightclub and foolish enough to ask a low-ranking police officer for help her in finding her friend, who she fears was shot or kidnapped during the incident. Laura’s hesitation in confiding in the policeman is borne out, when he drives her straight to Lino (Noe Hernández), the sleazy kingpin of the gang responsible for the slaughter at the nightclub.
With Laura trapped, thus begins the opportunity for Naranjo to show the inner workings of a ruthless criminal gang from the perspective of an innocent, unwilling participant. In this respect the film is unwaveringly rigorous, with Naranjo’s camera never drifting from Laura’s side. Through her eyes we bear witness to the gang’s heinous behaviour, most notably a terrifying public shoot-out with special police forces and later the brutal murder of a second DEA agent, whose body is hoisted to hang from a bridge in a theatrical act of provocation against the state. Elsewhere, much of Miss Bala is shot in dark, cramped interiors – squalid apartments, the front of an SUV, the back of an armoured lorry – making the work of Naranjo’s DOP Màtyàs Erdély a key factor in keeping the action in the first place merely observable, and in the second place consistently compelling.
Ultimately, the film’s success lies in the balance Naranjo strikes between a broad, politically-motivated depiction of a society in crisis and a highly personal story of a hapless young woman enduring a nightmare at the hands of a violent, opportunistic and deeply immoral oppressor. Stephanie Sigman (a former beauty queen in real life) is outstanding in the lead role, playing Laura with a mix of delicate vulnerability and grim stoicism as Lino subjects her to a series of humiliations and violations. Perhaps the most emotionally gruelling moment (even more so than two incidents of rape and a viscous physical beating) is the sight of Lino wrapping heavy-duty tape tightly around his new mule’s stomach and meticulously attaching thousands of dollars in neat little bundles. When the camera pans up it’s impossible to miss the contrast between Lino’s concentrated, all-in-a-day’s-work look and Laura’s despairing, fear-stricken features. As she bravely holds back tears it’s as if the abject reality of her newfound predicament is just dawning on her in these cruelly intimate moments.
In going against the norm and depicting life in criminal gangs as profoundly unglamorous, Miss Bala bears comparison with Matteo Garrone’s mafia saga Gomorrah – but our identification with Laura offers the film the crucial element of dramatic tension to sit alongside its bigger-picture concerns. Director Naranjo proves skilled enough to have it both ways with this provocative, gruelling thriller.
xx - posted on 23/05/2012 13:13:28
