Drug-related
crime in Mexico is not a unique subject for
films, but no film in recent memory has
confronted the issue with such force as Gerardo
Naranjo’s Miss Bala, a devastating look into the
collusion between drug-related gangs and law
enforcement. Caught in the middle is Laura
Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a 23-year-old
unassuming woman of limited means whose dream is
to enter and win the beauty pageant known as
Miss Baja. Naranjo whose last film was called
I’m Gonna Explode does just that, taking front
and center stage in his most complete and mature
work to date and Mexico’s submission for the
Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Loosely based on actual events, right from the
start we are dropped head first into the arena
of the Mexican drug wars. Living at home with
her father and young brother, Laura enters the
competition for Miss Baja at the suggestion of
her friend Suzu (Lakshmi Picazo), but she has no
idea what she is getting into. Things start to
go wrong almost immediately. Spending the
evening with Suzu in a nightclub seems like a
pleasant way to pass the evening. What she
doesn’t reckon with, however, is the eruption of
gunfire in a hit carried out by a local cartel
against agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Agency (DEA). Amidst the play of bursting
bullets, Laura loses Suzu in the chaos.
Seeking out a cop sitting outside in his car,
she asks him for help in locating her friend.
Big mistake. The corrupt cop leads her directly
into the hands of a group of nameless terrorists
led by local kingpin Lino Valdez (Noe Hernandez)
who is in the middle of a war with Mexican and
American drug enforcement agencies. After hiding
out at her father's house nursing her injuries
after being in the vicinity of a gun battle,
Lino tells the impressionable Laura that he will
help her find Suzu if she is willing to do
favors for him. Forced to do the gang’s bidding
at the risk of losing her father and little
brother and with no one to turn to for help,
Laura becomes a passive and willing tool for
those bent on greed and violence.
Even the beauty pageant is rigged by the cartel
so that Laura can be crowned as Miss Baja to the
amazement of the audience and especially the
more articulate and vivacious runner up. Fixing
the pageant is not done out of kind feelings
towards Laura but mainly to give her an audience
with a high ranking general who is targeted for
an assassination, even though it is murky as to
who is working with whom. As Laura, Sigman
elicits our empathy with her raw emotion and
simple honesty. Like the Mexican people, she is
powerless to prevent the brutality around her
because all levels of society are complicit in
its existence.
Miss Bala is a powerful thriller that is not
easy on the nerves but is worth sitting through
if only to remind us of the depth of the problem
which the director says, lies in the set of
values which continue to govern our culture.
According to Naranjo, “We have focused so much
on the greed and getting ahead of the rest that
we have lost sight of the fact that there has to
be rules, and there has to be a way of doing
things. Everybody is having his own battle to
survive and the rules or the law don't exist, so
I feel that we need a spiritual revolution.” To
that I can only say amen.
