Miss Bala

Miss Bala – This recent Mexican picture is an earnest well-meaning film, convincingly if single-mindedly staged, that can’t be recommended because it is so relentlessly dreary and unpleasant. A 23-year old girl from Tijuana is persuaded to participate in a beauty pageant. As is always the case with such pageants, the program has another agenda – it is apparently controlled by a drug cartel and the poor girl, aspiring to be Miss Baja, finds herself a pawn in a brutal war between the American DEA, local cops, the military, and a particularly nasty, dwarfish druglord who wears a truss (is he ruptured?), is perforated with bullet holes, and looks like he has staggered out of the last reel shoot-out in a Peckinpah Western. The film is completely consistent with its premise: the girl knows nothing about the bloody chaos erupting around her and has no idea as to anyone’s motivations. It’s a worm’s eye view of the drug war, everything depicted from the claustrophobic point-of-view of the girl who doesn’t have a clue as to what is going on. In retrospect, I was able to reconstruct some of the events as a plot – it seems to be a series of double and triple crosses with the girl acting as a go-between (and as bait) between various warring factions – but none of this is made clear during the duration of the movie. The camera stays pinned on Miss Baja and from her claustrophobic point of view nothing makes sense – shit just happens for no apparent reason at all. Throughout the picture, the poor girl is beaten up, raped from time to time, and dragged from place to place in stolen cars. She is held hostage in her own home, forced to make phone calls that make no sense to her, and, in a bizarre scene, goes straight from captivity, bruised from various assaults, to the stage of a Tijuana ballroom where inexplicably she is granted a big gilded crown as Miss Baja. (The film’s title, Miss Bala is a pun – it sounds like Miss Baja but means “Miss Bullets.”) For the last third of the movie, Miss Baja carries her talismanic crown around, suffering worse and worse degradation. In the end, she is served up as sexual bait to corrupt general, hides under his bed, during a shoot-out and, then, arrested, her face smashed, and accused of all the crimes in which she was a minor participant. We don’t see anything approximating drugs in the film. The girl is a mule but for cross-border smuggling of money. Everyone is corrupt. The DEA is colluding with the military which seems to have formed alliances with the drug cartels at their upper levels. When the girl goes to the police, they promptly turn her over to the drug cartel. The movie is oppressively shot, filmed very close to its suffering protagonist, a young woman with no discernible personality, and we see everything as a bloody, dangerous chaos – exactly how she perceives things. This film is probably exceedingly true to its subject matter and, for that reason, almost unwatchable. (The 2011 film was directed by Gerardo Naranja and stars Stephanie Siegman – the picture is even more depressing when you know that it is loosely based on real story, the bust of the beauty queen Miss Sinaloa, a 23-year old preschool teacher, who was, unlike Naranja’s heroine, apparently dating the top capo in a West Mexico drug cartel.)