Miss Bala
Director: Gerardo Naranjo
Year Released: 2011
Rating: 2.0
A quivering, poor, skinny young woman (Stephanie Sigman) makes the mistake of accompanying a friend to an audition for the Baja California Beauty Pageant, which leads to her being 'claimed' by a drug warlord and thrown into the world of shootouts and executions, Mexican Style. Basically, this belongs in the Battered Woman Genre, with the leading lady's character reduced to being Pretty Girl Who Cries - she's hardly 'developed' (though neither is any of the other characters) and the movie is a long string of Things Going Wrong, with Sigman's waif pushed around, exploited, shot at, molested and generally used up (she goes along because, well, she can't escape from this Dark Patriarchy). The basic implication is that women are mere objects in the grand scheme of masculine lunacy (fueled by drugs, money and a quest for power), and that Mexico is a Fairly Violent Place, and no solution can, at the moment, be found. Not exactly deep, I should say....
