Miss Bala (2012) dir. Gerardo Naranjo
Starring: Stephanie Sigman, Noe Hernandez, Irene Azuela, Jose Yenque

***½

By Alan Bacchus

Despite honourable inclusion in the Cannes En Certain Regard program and the Toronto International Film Festival, Miss Bala has gone much too far under the cinematic radar. It’s a Mexican thriller about a beauty pageant contestant who inadvertently gets roped into a violent drug war served up with a unique point of view on a familiar genre story.

We first meet Laura with her friend, Jessica, auditioning for a Tijuana beauty pageant. Laura indeed passes the test and subsequently gets invited to an industry party. While at the party a group of drug dealers busts in, kills a bunch of DEA officers and kidnaps Jessica, during which Laura, hiding out in the bathroom, comes face to face with the ruthless leader, Lino Valdez, who inexplicably allows her to live.

While searching for Jess the next day, she is kidnapped by Lino and his men, seemingly at random, and instructed to participate in some kind of elaborate scheme or heist. From here on in, Laura inexplicably gets picked up and dropped off several times by Lino. She is forced to drive their getaway car, spy on Mexico’s drug czar and is even forced back into the pageant without preparation; however, it’s rigged for her victory.

Told exclusively from Laura's perspective, Naranjo’s camera never leaves her. It's a risky approach, which alienates the audience for much of the film. At one point there’s a grandiose gun fight in a hotel room, yet we don't see any of it. Instead, we see only the reactions of actor Stephanie Sigman, who plays Laura. The plotting and narrative cause-and-effect is just as alienating and confusing, which only comes together in the final scene.

But there's also something inspiring in Naranjo's rigorous approach. The mystery of the film stems from the unconventional point of view. Every film needs to have a point of view, whether it’s one character, a group of characters, a political side or a shifting point of view. But in Miss Bala our viewpoint into this world is like a racehorse with blinders on. We only know what Laura knows, and Naranjo never wavers from this concept. All of this is part of his grand plan to blindside us with his beautifully set up wallop in the end.

Naranjo’s technique reminds us of the Dardennes Bros’ Le Fils (The Son). In that film Olivier Gourmet was shot exclusively using medium shots, and there was also a grand plan hidden from us until its great reveal. Naranjo’s anamorphic and elegant steadicam long-takes create a different cinematic experience, less like Le Fils and more like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant.

The ending reveals more than just a clever plotting device. It reveals, or perhaps exploits, the entrenched corruption of Mexico’s socio-political infrastructure. Miss Bala is uncompromising and tough, a ruthless picture that puts its hero through the most harrowing journey imaginable. And in the final frame it leaves us with a big question mark suggesting another dangerous journey ahead for Laura Guerrero.

Under the Same Moon (2007) dir. Patricia Reggin
Starring: Adrian Alonso, Kate del Castillo, Eugenio Derbez, Maya Zapata

***½

By Alan Bacchus

In 2007, Under the Same Moon (aka La Misma Lun) never did find its audience. This is no surprise. It’s uncool, unhip, old fashioned and a little corny. But its optimism and heart-on-its-sleeve sentimentality is a welcomed breath of fresh air. This simple tale of a young Mexican boy's journey to be reunited with his mother across the border is a near perfect rendering of the classic Odyssey-style storytelling and a small unearthed gem waiting to be discovered.

The opening establishes the two main characters, nine-year-old Carlito and his mother Rosario. Rosario crossed the border illegally 4 years ago and now lives in LA working as a maid so she can properly provide for her son. Carlito lives with his grandmother in Mexico. His life is safe and secure, but he’s brave enough to mask his desire to grow up in the company of his mother. Breaking the bond of mother and son creates such a strong cinematic hook, the real-world plausibility or logic of such a situation becomes mute. A dramatic event at the first act turn occurs which puts his domestic situation in question.

Carlito goes on a journey to find his mother, a journey that takes him across the border via a series of interesting characters – some good, some not so good – who help at each stage along the way. The less you know about the specifics of the story the better because despite the Hollywood conventions it’s an unpredictable series of narrative twists and turns – something new and exciting is discovered with every new beat, scene and act turn. If I was teaching a course on screenwriting, Under the Same Moon could be a case study on the perfect structure and execution of its genre.

The finale is unabashedly 'Hollywood', but it’s still thoroughly cinematic and satisfying. It’s the perfect ending for this special film.

The anchor is a remarkable performance from youngster Adrian Alonzo – an astonishing performance comparable to any of the acclaimed child performances in recent memory (i.e., Haley Joel Osment, Abigail Breslin, Dakota Fanning, etc.). But the lack of recognition for such work is equally astonishing. Young Adrian holds down the film with complete authenticity. His sad but strong eyes instantly give Carlito the street smarts the character needs for us to believe that he could make this journey.

The characters he meets along the way are introduced casually but are slowly developed under our noses. Check out the loathsome Enrique (Eugenio Derbez), who enters the picture as a fellow border crosser that has no need to hang around a nine-year-old while evading the INS ( I wouldn’t either). But surprisingly, Enrique hangs around long enough to become an integral supporting character who learns something about honour and friendship along the way.

It would be easy to dismiss the film for simplifying complex issues, or the fact that it makes no overt political stance on border relations between Mexico and the U.S. The border exists purely as a cinematic device or barrier between mother and son. The film is bigger than the political issue because it’s a pure form of storytelling, which in the annals of history will survive long past its 'politically divisive' contemporaries.

Miss Bala "Miss Bullet" (2011) dir. Gerardo Naranjo
Starring Stephanie Sigman, Noe Hernandez

****

By Blair Stewart

Sometimes I come out of a movie theatre and the film I've just seen is mighty enough that I want to walk along the streets afterwards and express my happiness to passing strangers. Tonight I had that rare joy. Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala is pure cinema, a head above the mostly minor works I've seen so far at Cannes, a coal-black rat maze of a film with a young woman tumbling up the steps of Mexican border anarchy towards absurdity.

Stephanie Sigman is Laura, the dirt-broke shirt-vendor in Tijuana, starting her day by entering into the local beauty pageant and ending the night an ensnared accomplice in a freeform ground battle between kingpin Lido (Noe Hernandez), his army of triggermen and Lido's local wonk officials going all-in against the gringos of the D.E.A. After witnessing Lido's Darwinistic housecleaning aptitude, Laura's safety is now tied to the drug-runner with her prospects on par with that of Schrodinger's cat. The story takes the humble girl and pitches her through unceasing sequences encapsulating Naranjo's disgust with the systemic rot of the federales, the silence of the feminicidios and the cartels above all, from the Baja to Tamaulipas state and San Diego to El Paso.

Miss Bala shifts so many gears it could enter an off-road rally and win, and it often appears to be heading towards preposterousness before wantonly leaping right into it. Lately, having watched so many unambitious releases coming from the mainstream and the art-house, it is so gratifying now to see a film that ignores plausibleness and the audiences' expectations to just keep running you ragged for two hours.

The tension of Laura's endangerment is perfectly sustained, only for Bala to dip into cruel satire until the story once again kicks into escalating carnage of ambitious direction. Stephanie Sigman is the same kind of sympathetic 'living barometer' of vast human destruction as Polanski had done when he focused on the plight of one man to express the enormity of the Holocaust in The Pianist. In his first role, Noe Hernandez as Lido has a fearsome Charles Bronson quality about him with dull black eyes and the odd charisma of a man who massacres casually.

Naranjo takes the myriad of ongoing violations between/against his countrymen, distills them into the plight of a lone girl at the mercy of Mexico's (and America's) phantom war dividing her land, then uses action as a Trojan horse to unleash his indignation when the audience might be hoping for entertainment. How awesome.

The script by Naranjo and Mauricio Katz is economical and confident in character and action, but the tandem of Naranjo and his cinematographer Mátyás Erdély is where the film succeeds. It’s a collaboration reminiscent of Alfonso Cuaron and Emmanuel Lubezki's best work together. Dollies, brilliant crane shots, Steadicam, mise-en-scène – the film is in constant, justified movement to match the pace of the story, and Naranjo knows what a camera is capable of and how it should really move.

I expect Miss Bala to be somewhere high up on my year-end list of best films.

Silent Light (aka Stellet Licht) (2009) dir. Carlos Reygadas
Starring: Cornelio Wall, Maria Pankratz, Miriam Toews

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

The magnificent opening shot sets the pace for Carlos Reygadas’ Cannes Jury Prize Winner ‘Stellet Licht’. The opening shot which starts on a blanket of stars and then conspicuously time lapses into a sunrise framed against a pastoral landscape view of the film’s setting, takes a full 5mins to enlighten us to the stillness of time in which the film’s small Mennonite community takes place.

At 146 mins, which in terms of actual screen content and story is really a 90mins film stretched by lengthy long takes such as these, will test the patience of even the most ardent art house cinephiles. But in the right viewing conditions – that is, a real movie theatre, or at least a darkened TV room with a big screen and without distractions – Reygadas delivers a rapturously bold, beautiful and spiritual cinematic experience.

Some background context on the story is needed to understand that the film takes place in a Mexican Mennonite community. The characters, who are white, speak a peculiar European/Germanic language and live in a geographic instinct village, very little evidence of Mexico at all. Johan (Cornelio Wall) is the patriarch of a large farming family. The daily chores split up in a fashion likely traditional over hundreds of years. Reygadas’ holds his shots of Johan moving about his environment in no hurry to get to the next shot. His allows more than enough breathing room for us to feel Johan’s daily pattern.

While Johan is stoic and controlled on the outside, internally his emotions are a rollercoaster. He’s already deep into a relationship another woman, Marianne – another local farmer. We receive this information in a unique revelation from Johan. Unlike every other affair we seen in the movies, Johan confesses to his father with an alarming matter-of-fact yet distressed attitude. In fact there’s no sneaking around for Johan who, from the beginning, has been up front and frank with his wife about his feelings – an effect which disarms us from hating Johan. This conflict of feelings which is rarely if ever expressed outwardly torment Johan

For his wife it’s even more. She too holds her poker face, revealing none of her own inner rage and resentment. It isn’t until an astounding emotional climax under a tree in heavy rain do we see and feel the effect of Johan’s infidelity.

Alexis Zabe’s strikingly handsome and formal cinematography is dripping with texture. The tone he achieves from his dusty-coloured and sparsely decorated compositions reminds us of Nestor Almendros’ seminal work in ‘Days of Heaven’. There’s even a distinct 70’s feel from his glorious anamorphic cinemascope camera process. Zabe admirably directs our attention by shifting his focus around his frames. In the case of the close-ups his focus is sometimes so shallow Johan’s nose, or chin, or even eyebrows might be out of focus.

We’re also reminded of Michael Haneke’s ‘The White Ribbon’ – a similarly paced and stoically shot mood piece about a small community dealing with events, and emotions foreign to them. As some of you might know, I wasn’t enraptured with White Ribbon as most other people were, and while Haneke’s vision seemed purposely to pull the rug from under us at the moment we expect a climax, in ‘Silent Light’, however pedantic, there’s a profound and thoroughly satisfying payoff at the end of his slow-burning wick.