Bardo review: Alejandro González Iñárritu, lost between truth and pretension

"You inevitably become what people think you are", someone gives his opinion a few hours (or years) on "Bardo (or the false chronicle of a handful of truths)" by Alejandro González Iñárritu , a film so obviously personal despite its epic scope that even the most benign stray comments betray the sting of self-flagellation. And yet, there's a reason this one manages to break the skin.

At this point in the film's dreamlike non-story, it's already clear that Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) - a journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker who returns to Mexico days before receiving a major industry award in his home from Los Angeles – is the replacement for the Oscar-winning author behind the camera, who is shooting an entire film in his native country for the first time since “Amores Perros” catapulted him to fame 22 years ago . Likewise, it's already clear that Silverio knows what people think of him, as "Bardo" is nothing if not the work of someone too successful to avoid his own press (the same was true of "Birdman", albeit in a more brooding and hostile way).

Iñárritu is fully aware that a significant portion of the American film establishment has come to regard him as "a pretentious fraud", and he seems to suspect that people south of the border feel he no longer belongs to them, or with them. And so he made a movie that proves the voices in his head are right, probably because that was the only honest way forward. With "Bardo," Iñárritu delivers a cartoonishly indulgent film about making cartoonishly indulgent movies – a rootless epic about a rootless man who was set free by his own self-doubt.

The result is unbearable and stunning in almost equal measure, and often at the same time. It's a midlife crisis meta-comedy that channels everyone from Federico Fellini to Emir Kusturica in the service of its carnivalesque self-parody. 'Bardo' isn't Iñárritu's first film to assert that 'life is just a series of insane events and silly images', or even the first to do so on purpose, but it is the first to use this concept. as a starting point rather than a big reveal. Iñárritu still feels lost at the end of its three-hour runtime, but that doesn't mean "Bardo" isn't a step in the right direction.

"Bardo"

"Bardo" opens with a flashback in which Silverio's wife, Lucía (Griselda Siciliani), gives birth to a CGI baby named Mateo who immediately tells the doctor that "this world is too fucked up" and asks to be pushed back inside his body. the mother's vagina — a wish granted without hesitation. As with all the fanciest touches of a film that strives to find reality in fiction and fiction in reality, this ridiculous prologue seems to resonate with a pain too raw for Iñárritu to approach. directly. It is unclear whether Iñárritu felt the grief of a stillbirth in his own family, or whether the lingering trauma of such a tragedy simply felt like a natural course of action for a non-linear journey through the liminal spaces that separate this life from itself, and even less from the next. Either way, it soon became clear that Mateo isn't the only one lost in the Bardo.

On the one hand, Iñárritu almost immediately...