When I write about film for this blog, I try to find some angle of approach. Whether from a cultural perspective, or with an eye to some element of the filmmaking, it is nice to have an entrance point when discussing a film. Sometimes however, the entrance point is provided by the quality of the film itself. Some films have such an effect that one feels the desire to do nothing more than extol their virtues at length, to heap praise on them for as many words as one possibly can. That is the effect produce by Gerardo Naranjo’s perfectly pitched narco-drama Miss Bala, an opening salvo for the possibilities of film in 2012
A tale of the ordinary people caught up in the seemingly unending and endlessly escalating drug war that has turned Mexico into some sort of existential psychodrama, Miss Bala opens with an act of independence. Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), ignores the cautions of her father, and runs off with a friend to earn a spot in the Baja California equivalent to whatever beauty pageant The Donald has trumped up this year. This independence is short lived however, as Laura quickly finds herself caught up in the dealings of local kingpin Lino (Noe Hernandez) where she discovers that passivity is more often than not the only alternative to drowning in the fast moving currents that now swirl around her. While Sigman oftentimes wears the face of someone who sees inscrutability as her best defense, she’s hardly ever a cipher. Rather than blankness, her expression represents the slow draining from her life of, well, life. The vivacity and joy that one would expect from a pageant contestant is instead replaced with a cold despair. Even once the film arrives at the spectacle of the pageant itself, the bright lights and gaudy costumes are overwhelmed by Sigman’s sadness, her inner turmoil so powerful she can’t even answer the questions of the pageant’s hosts. She remains a portrait of the actual state of Mexico, a contrast to the false regality and ebullient nature that the pageant seeks to represent. In an early scene in the film, the pageant director chides Laura not to laugh as she practices her walk down the runway, and it serves as an ironic bit of foreshadowing. The director wants Laura to treat the pageant with the seriousness it deserves, and while Laura might not be laughing any more, by the end of the film it is hard to see the pageant as anything more than a mere side show in a society that is irrevocably compromised.
Despite its bleak pretense, the film is also about those small moments of rebellion that the powerless rely on to give themselves even the smallest possibility of hope. The film opens with one of these moments, and the ending comes about as a result of another one. While these two moments are far from the only ones where Laura rebels, they are two of the only ones which bring forth results. It would be easy to consider Laura a passive figure, and in many respects she is, but as previously mentioned this passivity is a defense mechanism, in the same way that someone curls up into a ball once they know they are unable to escape whatever emotional or physical attack lies ahead. Laura makes several half-hearted attempts to escape throughout the film, reacting to her release and subsequent recapture with the same fading expression. She seems to expect that her plans will fail, and acts nonplussed at the eternal return of Lino, never questioning her seeming importance to him or role in some larger political game. Rather than see her passivity as cowardice, the film seems to instead imbue it with a sort of bravery. Here is someone that tries again and again to fight her way out of her nightmare, despite lacking that quality that provided sustenance to even the most selfless of history’s heralded heroes: hope.
The complications of Laura’s troubles are helped along by the film’s whirling pace, its rapid developments counterbalanced by the languid camerawork. As bullets fly and people escape, the camera moves slowly, gradually zooming in and out of an area, or sanguinely panning across a neighborhood. This gives the film an effect comparable to real time, as the audience takes in events as they are, rather than chopped up by editing into more digestible bites. The content is hardly more upsetting than other films of the genre, but the effect is one that wears heavily on you, potentially grueling in its unrelenting movement forward. In one of the film’s early scenes, Laura escapes from a party that has been attacked by a cartel, and the camera slowly pans from her hiding place to the people she is hiding from, before panning back again, only this time Laura is absent, having made her escape over a wall. This sort of take, which shows everything but not all at once, is emblematic of the film’s style, as it attempts to show the complexities of life amongst the cartels, but not in the fractured style that seems all too common today.
Miss Bala succeeds in one of the best ways that any visual medium can. The style of the film merges so well with its content that the two become almost impossible to separate. Of course one can, but with something this powerful why would you? I have seen this film labeled as exploitation by some, but to me that seems like something of a misinterpretation. Even if Miss Bala doesn’t necessarily propose an explanation for the violence therein, the intention hardly seems to be to titillate. The film wants us to be sucked into its hopeless, cyclical world, where we meet our fate less with excitement and more with a grim acceptance that we might never escape. The film’s mastery of style is a welcome moment in the wake of a disappointing 2011 and hopefully the film’s success is a sign of things to come.
Photo courtesy of: http://www.filmlinc.com/film-comment/article/nightmare-state
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