Queequeg’s review published on Letterboxd:
''My name is Laura Guerrero. I am 23 years old. My dream is to represent the beautiful woman of my state."
A fresh faced beautiful young Mexican woman bashfully recites to a stern faced pageant coordinator. With little cares apart form helping her small family run it's clothes washing business, hang out with her best friend and dream of winning a small beauty pageant to try and escape the poverty she and her family live in. However after an incident in a night club where numerous people are killed in what appears a drug related incident, she finds herself caught up in a web of the cartels and finds herself doing ever more desperate things just to survive......
It starts out promisingly enough with Stephanie Sigman as Laura a woman slightly unsure of herself but hopeful and optimistic of her future and then events transpire to pull her into the criminal underworld. We spend the first five minutes with the camera behind her, trailing her as if she's on the catwalk, and Naranjo purposefully obscures her face with various tricks until the title screen, nicely done if slightly contrived. It's after the point in the nightclub and her first assignments that the film does lose it's way as it becomes more a parable on the drug war and less a story of this young woman.
My problem with the film is tied so centrally to the thematic aims that it coloured the entire experience of the film - specifically the character of Laura and what she represents. She stands in as an obvious parallel to Mexico. With her constant expression of wide-eyed bewilderment she finds herself helpless to affect events as the larger, supposedly antagonistic corrupt forces in the drug trade buffet her in one direction or another. No matter what choices she makes are the wrong ones or so little as to be meaningless.
However her passivity while in keeping with the message the director was conveying makes the film a struggle to watch since we're with a character who has actions, increasingly disgusting actions, done to her. Her only role is to endure, to suffer, firstly for just being put in an impossible situation, then for her family and then for an implicit agreement she makes for herself. Does this show strength in a main character? Yes, undoubtedly but she becomes less a person and more a symbol as the film progresses due to this. She seldom makes active choices to alter her fate instead being bullied along one way or another and as for the choices she does make, they border on the stupidly naive. In one particular disturbing scene it had me questioning whether a rape had occurred - no physical coercion was used but putting someone in a position where they had to chose between sex with someone or striking out uncertainly on their own is it that much better? And it seems the choice she does make is more in service to the theme of the story than a 'real' person, while thematically it does parallel some of Mexico's societal unspoken compact with the drug cartel i.e. protection (ironically enough from the world they created), wealth, money, prestige. Her own dreams of winning the pageant and when she is asked by the host, whether 'wealth or fame' is important to her? it is almost a bludgeoning at this point by the director saying, 'see, this is exactly like the war on drugs!!!'
There are no real characters in the film, merely ciphers for various factions in Mexico, from the corrupted naive youth of the country, to the arrogant greedy drug lords, to the corrupt and indifferent officials in the 'war' on drugs. there is little to emotionally invest in, once Laura is reduced from a person to this symbol and the allegory takes over from the story.
The film is well crafted from Naranjo - it's brash, loud and quite stylised in places. Bullets fly around overhead in the run down streets of Mexico and brutal gangland executions abound but it feels a bit removed, a bit Hollywood-ised and seems lacking to what I imagine is the reality on the streets. It however hangs together like a series of scenes rather than a coherent film and ultimately I feel that Naranjo seem's to have been so intent on delivering his message that he forgot the story.