Miss Bala
A Film By Gerardo
Naranjo
Mexico
The
clash of situations is at the heart of Miss
Bala, a Mexican crime saga from director Gerardo Naranjo. Laura, a young
woman who has been forced to help a powerful drug lord, watches as a DEA agent
is run over, dragged through the street, and hung over a highway. The drug
lords then take her to a fixed beauty pageant, where the bright lights
practically blind her and the atmosphere promises youth, beauty, and love,
which couldn’t clash more with the men controlling her lives.
But
clash is also one of the fatal flaws of this gorgeously shot but somewhat
hollow film. Mr. Naranjo made a huge splash at the New York Film Festival in
2008 with I’m Gonna Explode, a unique
exploration of youth and class with the powerful energy adapted from Godard’s Pierret Le Fou. Here, Mr. Naranjo is in
somewhat stripping down the crime thriller to its essentials—another NYFF hit, Gomorrah, might be this film’s distant
cousin—though it indulges through its camera. The outcome is a somewhat mixed
result that may interest audiences with its bizarre but true story of a beauty
queen involved in the drug war, but rarely finds a uniquely statement on the terrible situation.
Problems
begin to arise from the beginning as soon as we meet Laura, played by the
beautiful Stephanie Sigman. Living in Baja California with her father and
brother, Laura has dreams of becoming a beauty queen. But following a friend to
a rather sketchy club one night, she becomes witness to a shooting massacre.
Looking for her friend, Laura instead finds herself a pawn in the schemes of a
powerful cartel, and the object of desire for its powerful leader (Noe
Hernandez). But then the film plays fast and loose with Laura. Is she trying to
escape? Does she complicity go along? The script provides Laura with a number
of “outs” so to say, which she ends up refusing, or only mildly trying at. This
wouldn’t be a problem so much if Mr. Naranjo committed to one way or the other,
but the half-side complexity creates a character without any sense of
motivation, despite Ms. Sigman’s attempts to create a three dimensional
character.
What
Mr. Naranjo unfortunately seems more involved in is his cinematic scope.
Adapting from De Palma, Socrsese, and Michael Mann, Mr. Naranjo uses a series
of breathtaking cinematic long takes to create a sense of reality. Often
shooting his protagonist from behind her back, the camera glides along in an
unflinching matter, and one particular long shot during a cartel battle with
police is bravura filmmaking.
Almost
too bravura, however. Mr. Naranjo explained that he wanted to make a film that
showed the drug war in a unique light, and perhaps the films and telenovelas that play in his home
country don’t give the same perspective we often see on the news here. But Miss Bala never really explains the
issues at the heart of the drug war; it seems perfectly content on its limited
perspective of Laura, who is a victim of the war, but provides no perspective
into what we really need to understand.
One
might suggest Traffic then as a more
nuanced film that gives a wider breadth of the drug war (as well as a number of
cinematic flourishes), but Miss Bala
at least begins the conversation of filmmakers from Mexico exploring their
difficult circumstances to the world. Mr. Naranjo is a filmmaker with an eye
for visual flair and detail, and his cold approach to the subject seems ripe
for a complex understanding of how the drug war has destroyed millions of lives
in Mexico. It’s unfortunate that Miss
Bala never delivers on that promises, as this rags to deceitful riches
story seems like it should provide a powerful punch to the human realities.
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