I’d never heard of a film called “Miss Bala” before seeing a trailer earlier this year for what looked like a run-of-the-mill bit of action-thriller with a Latina twist. Even at the time, I didn’t think I’d be eager to actually see the film. Skip ahead a few months, and I’m gearing to finally see the movie, when I find out it’s a remake. You know me, I’ve gotta see the original first, give myself some additional context for the remake. It took me a bit to track the film down, but once I did, I was struck.
The 2011 Miss Bala is definitely something to see. Set in Tijuana, the film follows Laura Guerrero as she and her friend, Suzu, look to enter the Miss Baja California pageant. After some minor prep work, they hit the club for a bit of clubby fun. Unfortunately, the club is suddenly infiltrated by a bunch of gun-toting toughs, who initially provide Laura with a few precious seconds to escape unscathed. Instead, she chooses to go after Suzu and bears witness to the impending slaughter. Laura is barely able to get away without her friend, and the next day looks to the police for help in locating her. The state policeman, though, we find out is on the take, and he leads Laura into the arms of the very gang that shot up the club earlier. What proceeds to happen is a series of whirlwind situations that drag Laura further and further into the hell of the local drug trade.
What’s eminently striking about this version of Miss Bala is just how stark and frank it is. Like No Country for Old Men, there is precious little music, the gunshots are loud and realistic, and the camera is consistently locked off, often focusing hard on Laura, almost none of the surrounding physical context visible to us: We are provided with almost no outside information, save what immediately impacts Laura, keeping us just a smidgen more clueless than she is. The result of this is a strong sense of disorientation and a forced, almost first-person identification with Laura and her plight. We are dragged unknowingly into the seedy world of violence and corruption, just as Laura is, and the bleakness of her situation is felt bluntly and strongly.
Going a bit deeper, these technical choices help to illustrate not just Laura’s poor situation in particular, but also the interconnecting systems of institutional corruption that surround her. Some police officers can’t be trusted, as they’re in the pocket of the gangs, and those that can be trusted are often the targets of those very gangs. Laura is not only able to be a full contestant in her pageant, but she ultimately gets the crown because of the interference of the gang she unwittingly became entangled with: Their hands are unknowingly in many pies, and the everyday eye isn’t normally aware of it. Laura’s life is irrevocably changed, all because these systems and the feedback loops they create happened to swirl around her and ensnare her. She did nothing wrong, she sought out no trouble, yet trouble found her, in spades. It’s a bleak, visceral tale and a fantastic piece of exceptional filmmaking.
With this foundation laid, my expectations for the remake were mixed. On the one hand, I was interested to see how Hollywood would handle this story, but my hopes for a similarly well-executed picture were rather tempered, knowing how these types of remakes are usually handled. I settled in with this new version and was immediately struck by the difference eight years and a border crossing made.
The remake contains the skeleton of the original plot, wherein a woman wanting to be involved with a beauty pageant unwittingly falls in with a violent Mexican gang following an incident at a night club. Beyond that, though, one would be hard-pressed to consider one a retelling of the other. This time out, our Laura character – now named Gloria Fuentes – is a Latina living in LA and working as a makeup artist (though she’s got dreams and ideas for bigger and better things, you guys). She heads down to Tijuana to see her friend, Suzu, who’s gearing up for the Miss Baja California pageant, for whom she’ll be providing makeup services. Shit hits the fan, though, when a gang shoots up the night club they’re at, and things get even worse when Gloria gets shanghaied by the gang after trying to alert the authorities.
From the get-go, things lose the punch the original packed. In what I can only assume to be an attempt to get Americans to care about things, they changed the lead to an American who just happens to have ties south of the border. This is no longer a Mexican story, it’s a shit-went-down-during-my-vacation-to-Baja story. Her no longer striving to be in the pageant removes one of those aforementioned overlapping layers of corruption and societal interpenetration. The fact that she’s not the one with the family – it now belongs to Suzu – lowers the stakes a bit further; sure, the gang could feasibly still reach her family Stateside, but they’re no longer local, right down the street. And the character arc set up from the beginning of Gloria wanting to assert herself in her job and take control of her life has all sorts of hack-y and negative implications for the overall narrative.
Speaking of, the entire message of the original film is completely erased here. In its place is the usual tale of a put-upon woman striking back at her tormentors, earning the backbone she’s wanted from the start. I should have known about this, considering it was featured in the trailer, but it still came as something of a shock, if for no other reason than I figured one of the central points of the original would be held onto. Nope. What’s worse is that Laura wasn’t even entirely passive about her situation in the original: At several points, she actively tries to either escape the gang’s clutches or undermine their efforts, showing that she still maintained some level of strength in spite of the seemingly hopeless situation she was thrust into. But even the antagonists are given some polish in this new version, with some humanizing speeches reminding us that “Hey, all sides do bad things, okay? It’s not fair to judge just us as being bad, you guys.” It’s a slap in the face to the righteous messaging of the original, not to mention another example of bland, formulaic garbage sneaking into a purposeful narrative.
Behind the scenes, all of the interesting camera work is gone, replaced by the standard action-thriller fare. What was once stark silence is now a succession of obstreperous, blaring pop songs that ensure no atmosphere, much less a tense one, is allowed to survive. The sharp visuals that added to the reality of the original story are replaced with the slick, glossy mucous trail of the Hollywood machine, leaving a bland, drab, lifeless film in our laps. This is a remake that was chosen because it could be forced into a certain tried-and-tested Hollywood mold, complete with explosions and a decided lack of tested consciences: There’s no feeling put into it, so we get none out of it.
I know it’s become old hat by now, but we’ve gotta stop letting Hollywood get away with such life-sucking remakes. It’s bad enough we’re stuck with live-action recreations of animated properties that go on to make bank because we’re apparently drawn to nostalgic brain-picking like moths to those new halogen headlights that have been blinding us on the streets lately, we don’t need actual quality films to be rent apart in such an emotionless manner. Sure, the original doesn’t go away because it was remade, but anyone seeing the remake before the original will be turned off of the older version by the newer’s lack of worth: Why watch the old one, which I’d have to read (unless I spoke Spanish, anyway), when I can just get this one, which is newer and thus shinier and better? I’m just an old man shaking my fist at clouds, I get it, but I’m still gonna do it. Some things never change.
Allusions of Grandeur 