There’s exciting talent on display in Mexico’s hopeful for an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, “Miss Bala,” though this strange and eerie noir is more a collection of knockout scenes than a fully realized story.
Laura Guerrero (a superbly restrained Stephanie Sigman) is a working-class girl in Baja California, Mexico, who thinks it’d be fun to enter a beauty contest. When she and a friend attend tryouts and a party, the other girl disappears, and Laura gets caught up in a series of shootouts between a Mexican drug gang and DEA agents.
As directed by Gerardo Naranjo, the movie is a visual stunner. He makes use of vivid single takes that are at their most spellbinding during complicated action scenes, and Naranjo’s fluid, graceful, patient style presses the suspense.
So why did I lose interest as the movie went on? It’s shot from Laura’s point of view, and she doesn’t understand anything that’s happening — so neither do we. Moreover, she’s a passive, limp figure who cringes her way through one bloodcurdling situation after another. (At one point she gets thousands of dollars taped to her midsection and ordered to enter the US. At another she gets sent to flirt up a cop in his bedroom.)
Bizarrely, the gangsters and the movie keep returning to the subject of the beauty pageant. It’s as disconcerting as if the American Music Awards were interrupted by scenes from “No Country for Old Men.” Moreover, it seems strange that these heavy villains would find so many uses for this random hostage, who is effectively the only important character in the movie.
Naranjo, who also co-wrote the script, needs to engage with how a story builds to a climax and how characters develop, but his ability to create a stunning tableau and his expertise in generating tension are not in doubt. He may have a brilliant future.