Miss Bala (2011, directed by Gerardo Naranjo) was Mexico's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars last year. It didn't make the short list, but there's no shame in that. It certainly deserved to be in the conversation. It's a harrowing movie. From my perspective, it's a movie that functions as a kind of distaff answer to Cormac McCarthy's border novels. McCarthy, famously, is uncomfortable writing about women. This movie places its heroine square in the center of a story that bears more than a passing resemblance to No Country for Old Men, minus the old men. There's a withering gaze at the role of women in Mexican society too, and that has an echo in McCarthy as well, given that he once placed an idealized woman in the center of a Mexican patriarchy in All the Pretty Horses and used her as the crucible in which to test his hero. It certainly wasn't about her. Women are phantasms for McCarthy:
"The last time that he saw her before she returned to Mexico she was coming down out of the mountains riding very stately and erect out of a rainsquall building to the north and the dark clouds towering above her. She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal. "
The heroine in Miss Bala suggests that this is so much bullshit. As well she should.