Why I Saw It: Invited to screen it, always interested in film with social implications, and curious to see James Russo (even though only cited as “with,” so wasn’t expecting any real screen time).
What I Thought: [Great] Rattling and deeply moving. Difficult but eminently worthwhile and necessary.

Miss Bala. Dir. Gerardo Naranjo. Perf. Stephanie Sigman, Noe Hernandez, Jose Yenque, James Russo. Twentieth Century Fox, 2011.

A young woman pursuing a dream of becoming a beauty queen finds herself at the wrong place at the wrong time and swept involuntarily into the machinations of a powerful Mexican drug gang.

Stephanie Sigman realizes who just stormed into her life / Photo: 20th Century Fox

American public policy states that it’s better that ten guilty people go free than one innocent go to prison. Not for some lofty ethical standard, but because an innocent is temperamentally unequipped to cope with being surrounded by hardened criminals. The damage to the innocent would be incalculable. And where the drug trade rages rampant, such an innocent is usually not a suspect undergoing due process of law, but rather simply the person on Main Street living out their day.

Miss Bala makes this salient point with iron fist, illustrating the desperately precarious nature of life in a country dominated by organized crime. About how capriciously one can utterly lose control of one’s life when nothing stands between the powerful and the ordinary individual … about how easily one can become a tool, completely subsumed by that element, no longer oneself … about making decisions to try to turn certain death into a fighting chance to live. About how such a war zone offers no succor of purpose or nobility, promises no end in sight.

Miss Bala: eminently worth one’s time, truly sobering. And leaving us with as many questions as awarenesses, not the least of which being, “How on earth do we as a community ~ of people, of nations ~ address such a thing?” Of course the politicians and pundits would love to sit us down and tell us the so-called answer to that. But better, Miss Bala gives us a foundation to begin discerning the answers for ourselves.

Update: The day or two after this post, the Houston Chronicle reported a governmental plan under discussion whereby border agents would be assigned in time-limited rotations, reducing the opportunity for being seduced or coerced into cooperation with drug runners. Encouraging!