Cannes 2011: Miss Bala, Polisse, Wu Xia

Miss Bala (pictured), by Gerardo Naranja, arrived as the first of two heavily tipped Mexican movies at this year's festival, and rather good it is too. Continuing the festival theme (so far) of luckless female heroines, it stars newcomer Stephanie Sigman as Laura, a working-class girl who dreams of being a beauty queen. She enters the local Miss Baja contest (the title, Miss Bala, I think, is a pun that in Spanish might suggest “Miss Bullet”), and to celebrate getting in she goes out for the night with her best friend. The club is heaving with sleazy cops that her friend thinks will help their chances of winning, but Laura is uncomfortable there. And with good reason; the party is broken up by members of a vicious drug cartel who attack the room with all guns blazing and the instruction of “no mercy”. Laura goes to the police – to find her friend – and finds herself delivered straight back to the gang, beginning a tense, bullet-riddled nightmare that pushes her to the brink of sanity.

It's a mystery to me that this film was not in competition; Naranja's filmmaking style is not only fluid and riveting but the film takes a well-worn Mexican genre – the DEA vs the cartels – and makes something wholly fresh from it. Sigman isn't always up to carrying the weight of it, and Naranjo has perhaps made a film that's longer than it needs to be, but this is a gripping film about the pervasiveness of drug culture and corruption in Mexico. Nobody comes off well, and the ease with which Laura is tainted by association simply by mingling with lowlifes on both sides of the law drives the film to its somewhat grim resolution. The Mexican tourist board won't like it, but Naranjo has fashioned a provocative film with broad appeal. It's a film about a pretty woman and men with guns, but totally subverts that archetype while delivering on both fronts.

Another strong female-fronted movie is the ensemble piece Polisse (above), by Maiwenn Le Besco, aka just Maiwenn (aka The Diva in Luc Besson's Fifth Element). Having to measure up the last big French crime drama Un Prophete is no easy task, and Polisse almost manages it, largely by not trying. The subject is Paris's CPU – Child Protection Unit – and, though overlong, the film has a jazzy, rhythmic quality that, at its best, resembles The Class and, at its worst, brings flashbacks to the well-made but self-indulgent Little White Lies. The result is a soapy, Hill Street Blues-like study of the people behind the badges: who they are and how they feel. I didn't quite buy the way these guys flocked together both on the clock and off, but even if it doesn't win anything next week (rapper Joey Starr earns a Best Actor tip from me), I have a feeling that this will be one of the most influential films in this year's line-up. Expect an English-language version, most likely for TV, soon.

Wu Xia (right) is a pretty self-explanatory title for Peter Chan's often brilliant martial arts movie. Using the Sherlock Holmes-style conceit of a gifted but antisocial sleuth, it stars The House Of Flying Daggers' Takeshi Kaneshiro as Xu, a detective sent to a small village when a botched robbery leads to the deaths of two thugs. It seems like an open and shut case – the two men were killed by an unassuming local man named Jin-Xi (Donnie Yen) – but Xu has other ideas. Reconstructing the scene in his mind, Xu forensically uncovers the truth behind such a seemingly simple chain of events and concludes that Jin-Xi is not who he says he is – possibly one of three fugitive, dangerous killers. The film that then unfolds, while hardly original (the History Of Violence plot is pretty common these days), is one of the best Asian action films of the past year, never quite matching the sophistication of Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins but definitely knocking Tsui Hark's Detective Dee into a cocked hat.