According to the new film Miss Bala, the bizarre level of corruption in response to Mexico’s drug cartel violence infests every nook and cranny of the country’s society. Director Gerardo Naranjo offers a searing peek into this harrowing, topsy-turvy world in one of the year’s most inventive films (Mexico’s official entry into this years Academy Awards competition).
Main character 23-year-old Laura Guerrero (an enthralling Stephanie Sigman) her eyes as big and piercing as full moons, transfixes nearly every frame of the film. The aspiring beauty pageant contestant faces no good choices once she’s kidnapped by a nasty gang after witnessing their invasion of a nightclub which she reluctantly attends with a girlfriend. She chooses to comply with the gang’s leader, a self-assured, rigorous Lino Valdez (a convincing Noe Hernandez) rather than watch her father and younger brother go down. Navanjo adroitly and suspensefully shoots even the film’s action strictly from Laura’s standpoint and what follows is a just-enough stylized vision of all hell breaking loose. He perfectly interweaves the gang’s self-described “fearless” progress toward increasingly daring battles with overwhelmed and often corrupt authorities with Laura’s steadfast and stoic coping. In a tribute to Naranjo, whose cinematic style evokes a more pensive Michael Mann, the more outrageous events become, the more plausible they get.
Laura goes on more determinedly with each new humiliation as she chauffeurs, smuggles, and seduces her way into survival. She transcends that very survival instinct with a pathos that surely symbolizes the Mexican people as they have endured the 36,000 drug cartel deaths in the last several years.
The film returns to the beauty pageant theme at a most surprising time. The sullen Laura doesn’t seem to be enjoying her participation, yet the ensuing pageant serves as an incongruous reminder that somehow Mexico’s “normal life” goes on despite many wasted billions of dollars a year joing the lost lives to put a blight on a buoyant country’s aspirations. Like Laura’s non-choices Miss Bala suggests there seems to be no way out of the violence other than emulating Laura’s extraordinary ability to persevere.
8.5 Wild Ass Cartels (Out of 10)