Beauty Queen With No Place to Hide

Stephanie Sigman in "Miss Bala." Credit Eniac MartĂ­nez Ulloa/Fox International

A first-rate art-house thriller, “Miss Bala” tells the strange, seemingly impossible story of a Mexican beauty queen who becomes the accidental pawn of a drug cartel. It’s an adventure story that could be called a contemporary picaresque if it weren’t so deadly serious, and might be called fantastical if it weren’t loosely based on a true story of a former Miss Hispanic America. One day a beautiful young woman, Laura (a sympathetic Stephanie Sigman), is trying to enter a Miss Baja contest; a few hours later she’s cowering in a nightclub, dodging gunfire and gangsters who bequeath her another title, Miss Bala — Miss Bullet.

In 2008 a Mexican beauty queen named Laura Zúñiga and seven men were arrested, their S.U.V. loaded with cash and guns. Ms. Zúñiga was soon anointed Miss Narco by Mexican newspapers, and the American news media had its fun too. Time magazine ran an article about her with the headline “Busted! Taking Down Miss Hispanic America,” embellishing it with a glamour shot of her in a gown, her bosomy cups running over. Her arrest, as Time put it, provided “some variety in the news for a nation weary of piles of corpses and vicious firefights in its relentless drug war.” She was soon released and, while she lost her pageant crown, unlike some casualties of the drug war she did keep her head.

The director Gerardo Naranjo coaxes a few anxious laughs out of this weird tale, which he has liberally expanded on, but his tone remains almost relentlessly sober. It’s no wonder: According to the Mexican government more than 47,000 people have been killed since President Felipe Calderón began deploying the military against the cartels in 2006, a number that makes the body count in the film seem conservative. Even so, while Mr. Naranjo adds some real, grim statistics to the fictionalized mix, he doesn’t try to legitimize the story with documentary verismo. Instead, working from a script he wrote with Mauricio Katz, Mr. Naranjo gives “Miss Bala” the pulse of an action film, the tears of a telenovela and a heroine who easily shoulders the metaphoric weight of a people living under siege.

Stephanie Sigman in “Miss Bala,” about a pageant winner in Baja who becomes entangled in the drug war. Credit Eniac MartĂ­nez Ulloa/Fox International

If Ms. Sigman’s shoulders at first seem too narrow to carry any weight, her character’s resilience and the actress’s committed performance undergird that frail form. With her father and brother, Laura sells clothes for a living. The promise of a prize and a better life for her brother helps explains why she tries out for the pageant, though Mr. Naranjo isn’t big on expository details or character motivations. Rather, he plunges you into the story without much background or explanation and lets you get up to narrative speed as events unfold and characters enter. With his camera close on Laura’s heels and sometimes behind her glossy head, he faithfully follows her around, including to the pageant audition where she meets her friend Suzu (Lakshmi Picazo) and is accepted as a contestant.

Later that evening Laura tries to find Suzu in a club throbbing with music and dancers. With the camera fluidly trailing Laura — it glides directly behind her, which makes it look as if she were seated in the row in front of you — she enters a shadowy, cavernous dance hall and then a dark room with a dazzlingly white back wall. As she gazes at the figures silhouetted against the wall, you realize that this brilliantly staged sequence visually evokes the passage from dimmed theater wings to lighted stage. At which point, in a tense, creepy scene, the cartel invades the club and starts shooting the place up, killing many, including partying drug enforcement agents. Laura escapes but only after the cartel’s leader, Lino (Noe Hernández), takes notices of her.