Miss Bala
Directed By: Gerardo
Naranjo
Written By: Gerardo
Naranjo and Mauricio Katz
Starring: Stephanie Sigman and Noe Hernandez
Director of Photography: Matyas Erdely, Editor: Gerardo
Naranjo, Art Direction: Ivonne Fuentes, Original Music: Emilio Kauderer
Rated: R for
bloody, truthful violence.
There’s a strong dynamic between
two very different worlds 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, his corpse
bloodied and barely hanging together. The drug lords then take her to a fixed
beauty pageant, where the bright lights practically blind her, the atmosphere
of the event promoting youth, beauty, and love.
This clash of universes, and the
fallacy between them, centers the powerfully shot but somewhat hollow drama,
which made a splash on the festival circuit last year.Naranjo made some
headlines 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 (full
disclosure; I worked on the subtitles for I’m
Gonna Explode while interning for IFC Films). Here, Naranjo is in somewhat
stripping down the crime thriller to its essentials—the Italian mafia film Gomorrah might be this film’s distant
cousin—though it indulges with its cinematic excess. 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 way to outlive its
genre ties and speak candidly about the issues it raises.
