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Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala, the filmmaker's ravenous third feature, confirms suspicions that the recent signs of violent, subversive rage in Mexican cinema are no joke. Bleaker and far more unyielding in its very real terror than Jorge Michel Grau's ferocious cannibal satire, We Are What We Are, Miss Bala depicts Mexico as a world ravished by war, torn to shreds, and now struck by a plague of horror, from kidnappings and rapes to methodical torture to brutal, cold acts of murder, all of which go largely unanswered for and unjustified. Indeed, this kinetic tale of a beauty queen who becomes a courier, a pawn and a prostitute for a powerful, notorious drug cartel makes real those things that were merely talked about in El Sicario: Room 164.
The mood of the piece is infected with dread but when I first saw Naranjo's film, the feeling I had when leaving the theater was lively, energetic even. Though undeniably concerned with seismic shifts in sex, politics, age and class, Naranjo demonstrated himself as a director of action first and foremost with his first film, the flawed but quite interesting Drama/Mex. I'm Gonna Explode, his last film, showed a prodigious leap in ability, repurposing the age-old tale of teenaged runaways with a booster shot of bottled-and-shaken hormones. The relentless bombast of I'm Gonna Explode has given way in Miss Bala, and what remains is a stunningly assured sense of personal style, so fluid and marvelously detailed in its tour of a war zone that is separated and in many ways exasperated by a border that is convincingly portrayed as easily permeable.
Written by Naranjo and Mauricio Katz, Miss Bala can be understood to be a film about veneers. Complexion and beauty are certainly the things that most concern Laura (Stephanie Sigman) as the film begins; they are, after all, the key facets of a wannabe beauty queen. Just barely making the first round of try-outs, Laura and her best friend celebrate their imagined futures as models by grabbing beers with a group of local thugs, who are quickly liquidated by a rival cartel, led by Lino (a startlingly effective Noe Hernandez). Witness to Lino's crime, Laura's descent into the cartel's clutches is at once methodical and utterly seamless: From a low-level driver to a money mule to bargaining chip, Laura's only true flaw is that she remains hopeful that someone of power has not been contaminated by Lino.A rampant, remorseless action film that already seems fit for the canon, Miss Bala tosses a great deal of action-thriller archetypes under the bus. Naranjo's film eradicates the notion of the final girl and heroic naivete, and keeps Laura an ostensible innocent, a ready-made allegory for the soul of Mexico. To Naranjo's credit, however, this metaphorical weight emboldens the narrative and Laura's beauty-queen aspirations allow for the film's most devastating sequence, in which a beaten, broken, dosed, and destroyed Laura is crowned Miss Baja on live television after being unable to walk, perform or even speak clearly. Sigman, herself a former model, gives a tremendously physical performance and is surprisingly successful in conveying the methodical waning of Laura's pride in the face of death and the murder of her father and younger brother. The filthy and far gone lost soul we see wander off at the end of the film is unrecognizable to the flirtatious, spritely teen we see at the beginning of the film.
Unremitting in its intensity, Miss Bala is admittedly cynical, but the cynicism is hugely convincing in this case, which makes the dreamlike motion of Naranjo's camera both odd and oddly transfixing. In the midst of a botched trip across the border, Laura is pulled and pushed by several hands, as a bedlam made of speeding bullets and exploding cars engulfs her. Naranjo, along with talented DP Matyas Erdely, puts us through a series of hypnotically fluid long takes that rattle with movement both tremendous and nuanced. The camera seems as if it's floating through the air, moved only by its own singular fascination, but the violence depicted in Miss Bala is not of some charred-black nightmare. It is the undeniable product of a war that has sustained a high, screaming pitch of brutality for well over a decade at this point; a war with a list of casualties that no compassionate person could ever fathom correctly. The polite label is "The War on Drugs" but in Naranjo's blistering vision of a very real hell, we don't see many intoxicants. Just the last gasps of an extinguished glow behind Sigman's eyes as the last drop of her humanity is licked up by a cartel kingpin for little more than sport.
