If I claim Gerardo Naranjo’s “Miss Bala” is a simple genre film elevated by a remarkable mis-en-scene, it’s not intended as a backhanded compliment. Alfonso Cuaron pulled off something similar with his “Children of Men,” a fairly simple, even clichéd premise that plays like gangbusters based entirely on how it’s filmed. Like the Cuaron film, Naranjo pulls off a lot of longtakes that are almost shockingly elegant; the aesthetic exhibit on display is nothing less than graceful. The director's first coup was casting the remarkable Stephanie Sigman as Laura Guerrero, a simple girl with big dreams, who wants to compete to be the next Miss Baja—the title of a local beauty pageant (replace the ‘j’ with an ‘l’ and you get ‘Bala,’ or ‘bullet,’ a disturbing and entirely apt play on words). Class-conscious upward mobility would seem to be the name of the game here, although the narrative quickly spirals out of control. After an initial interview with pageant organizers, Laura tries to hunt down her party-animal friend Jessica, ultimately finding her at a (seemingly illicit) nightclub. While Laura collects herself in the bathroom, Jessica dances with some men wearing DEA jackets, and that’s when the (figurative) shit hits the fan. Masked gunmen assault the club, gunning people down and mysteriously sparing Laura’s life.

I hasten to add that this brief narrative recap only becomes clear as the film progresses—Naranjo very carefully tethers us to Laura’s subjective POV, and we never know more than she does. Naranjo makes his aesthetic agenda clear in the film’s opening scene, as the camera tracks just behind Laura’s head for the entirety of a stunning longtake. It’s not entirely different from the Dardenne brothers' approach—this very literal fastening to a physical person. We’re not seeing only what they see, although that’s almost true, but we are only experiencing what they experience (or, in Laura’s case, suffer through). It would seem that the leader of a drug cartel has taken a liking to Laura, hence her survival in the bathroom, but his affections take the form of a kind of trail by fire. Laura becomes, at his insistence, a delivery girl, a messenger and a drug mule, desperate to save her father and younger brother. What follows is a series of stunning set-pieces, as the gang leader puts her through her paces, all the time Naranjo limiting our knowledge to that of Laura’s immediate, firsthand experience. She drops a car off in front of a police station, a bizarre, tense scene that makes almost no sense while it’s happening but nonetheless sets much of the following plot into motion; Naranjo goes back and carefully fills in blanks as he goes, so that we find out the significance of a scene ten or fifteen minutes after it’s happened.

I can’t say enough good things about the film’s central set-piece, a kind of subjective, first-person version of the grand shootout in "Heat"; the camera pulls back just enough from Laura to reveal some peripheral action, but it stays on the ground with her, tracking along as she runs from one car to another. The sound design does a lot of the work here, and it is truly remarkable; each shot sounds like a canon, with shattereglass falling everywhere. In another scene, indicative of Naranjo’s dark sense of humor, an epic long shot pans with Laura as she walks down a deserted street. The camera moves past her to follow a white limousine with a bride hanging out of the sun roof (her jubilation and excessive adornment mirroring that of the beauty pageant), only to pan back to Laura as a series of black SUVs pull up behind her, masked men emerging and attacking. For the duration of the shot, there’s a huge plume of black smoke in the background, lending the proceedings an apocalyptic flavor. Naranjo eventually makes sense of what we’ve seen, but it is profoundly disorienting as we initially observe it.

As good as all of this is, count me in the camp that doesn’t know what to do with the last act of "Miss Bala." We ultimately return to the beauty pageant, although Laura is so shell shocked by her ordeal that she can barely make sense of her surroundings. The narrative seems to reach a natural end point, and although it is perhaps a little too on-the-nose, it’s shot through with dark irony and an absurd sense of bleak comedy. We then proceed to spend another twenty minutes or so watching more misery heaped upon Laura’s slight shoulders, with a final twist that, in hindsight, doesn’t make a lot of sense. We’ve spent so much time tethered to this character's specific perspective that the attempt to suddenly turn her into a metaphor for an entire country seems strained, trying too hard for broader profundity. The term Kafkaesque isn’t quite right, but there’s an absurd quality to her suffering; she’s most literally in the wrong place at the wrong time all the time. Without totally spoiling the ending, I can say I don’t agree with critics suggesting Laura’s complicit passivity: she makes choices that attempt to influence her situation, although the film’s opaque ending suggests unending suffering lays ahead. I do think it’s to the film’s detriment that Naranjo leaves open too many avenues for interpretation, as "Miss Bala" works best as a single-minded, full-steam ahead thriller. Still, it’s hard to fault someone for being too ambitious. There’s intelligence at work here, the viewer’s lack of knowledge linked with Laura’s limited perspective suggests something bigger on Naranjo’s mind. I think he’ll get it all right next time out.

Review by:
Daniel Gorman