NYFF ‘11: Miss Bala review
In Mexico in the past 5 years alone drug cartels have been responsible for over 36,000 deaths. This horrifying statistic is shown onscreen during “Miss Bala,” a fictional but no less gripping thriller about a beauty pageant contestant who is kidnapped by a drug lord and forced to become a runner for his gang. Laura Guerrero (excellent newcomer Stephanie Sigman) is a poor young woman from Tijuana who wants to apply for the Miss Baja California beauty pageant to win the prize money for her family. But while tracking down her friend Suzu at a disco she ends up trapped in the bathroom when the gang invades the place and turns it into a bloodbath. Suzu disappears so after a few days Laura tries tracking her down but soon finds that the law enforcement may not be of much help as she ends up face to face with the drug lord Lino (Noe Hernandez) who gathers her name, address and phone number and let’s her go. Shortly afterwards she’s contacted to start running errands for Lino and things only become more intense from there.
Loosely inspired by a real incident where a beauty queen was arrested with gang members and later quietly released by police, director/co-writer Gerardo Naranjo and co-writer Mauricio Katz worked from the headline backwards to imagine what she might have done to end up in that situation. The camera is almost never away from Laura the entire film so we never know more than she does in any given situation. You may feel a bit behind during the first half of the film, as Laura does, but by the end most of the pieces fit together to what was going on the whole time. This is harrowing (and potentially depressing) subject matter but Naranjo makes it thrilling to watch. Shot in incredibly long fluid takes that keep the suspense mounting throughout, the film avoids cliches and shows incredible restraint. By keeping things serious but not veering into the grotesque, the film is a sparse artful thriller with a conscience. Many will be turned off by the bleak subject matter but they’ll be missing out on one of the strongest films of the year.
