Miss Bala

• Tickets

Movie Details

• Genre: Suspense/Thriller
• Release Date: 2012-01-20 NY/LA
• Running Time: 113 min.
• Director: Gerardo Naranjo
• Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Noe Hernandez, Lakshmi Picazo, Leonor Victorica, Irene Azuela
• Writer: Gerardo Naranjo, Mauricio Katz
• Distributor: Fox International

Mexico's submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar race, Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala literally spells out the destiny of its would-be beauty-queen heroine in its first shot, a collage of glamour magazine clippings on her bedroom wall built around the headline "Fashion Victim." The bedroom belongs to Laura (Stephanie Sigman), a 23-year-old living in a wood-slat shack in Tijuana, who with her friend Suzu enters the Miss Baja California pageant. The night before rehearsals begin, they go to a nightclub to hang out with a DEA agent who, Suzu says, can help their chances in the contest. Then gunmen invade the club. When Laura asks a cop for help, he delivers her right into the hands of the thugs, whose leader takes a liking to Laura and forces her to collaborate on a variety of crimes. In exchange, he fixes the pageant to make her a winner. Like Naranjo's last film, the doomed young love story I'm Gonna Explode, Miss Bala, which was inspired by a true story, takes on the perspective of the powerless in a system where every authority figure is corrupt. In Explode, that system was adolescence, and the style was fever dream. Miss Bala's broken system is Mexico itself, and the all-consuming drug war is portrayed as a slow-rolling waking nightmare. Laura's suffering is symbolic, a surrogate for the suffering of a society helplessly caught in the crossfire.