Iñárritu’s ‘Bardo’: An exploration of Mexican identity and an answer to Fellini’s ‘8½’
For someone who won the Academy Award for Best Director in two consecutive years (Birdman, The Revenant), Alejandro G. Iñárritu had his latest film, Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, quietly dropped on Netflix last month. Reasons? For starters, its elliptical narrative, slipping in and out of surreal sequences and verbose exchanges steeped in Mexican history, has minimum regard for being accessible to an audience that enjoyed Iñárritu’s cheerfully meta Birdman (2014) or The Revenant (2015), mostly recalled for Leonardo DiCaprio wrestling with a bear.
Bardo, instead, is the kind of “honest film”, one that will “bury forever all the dead things we carry around inside”, that director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) desperately wants to make in 81/2. The Italian master Federico Fellini’s 1963 classic is the obvious textbook film for anybody wanting to make a movie about their anxieties as a filmmaker in a surrealist, no-holds-barred manner. Bardo feels like a response to 81/2, where Guido is trying to make something pure and honest, a pursuit that transports him through his bank of memories in a series of disjointed scenes. Bardo is the film Guido could have made and be proud of.
An impressionistic view of life
But Bardo is not just a therapeutic confession for Iñárritu. The film’s scope is larger than that of 81/2 and what Guido wants to make: Bardo also investigates the cosmopolitan ‘world citizen’ Mexican’s relation to their homeland. The dialogue is largely in Spanish (Iñárritu’s last Spanish feature film was 2010’s Biutiful) and the film is 159-minutes-long. Since its September premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, Bardo has been critically slotted as self-indulgent (if not narcissistic), which isn’t an incorrect description, but its exact qualities which alienated viewers make Bardo special. What’s more enthralling than to be able to jump right into the soul of an artist who is being as emotionally naked as possible?
Bardo begins and ends with journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) flying over the Mexican desert. In between, we see a baby returning to his womb immediately after birth because he thinks “the world’s too fucked up”; Mexican skies and streets littered with dead casualties of the drug wars, bringing to mind Roberto Bolano’s novel 2666; and shortly after, Silverio climbing a mountain of these corpses and arguing with 16th century conquistador Hernán Cortés who overthrew the Aztec Empire and laid the foundation for what we know as Mexico.
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The key to the film’s dreamlike quality is locked in the title itself: bardo, in Tibetan Buddhism, is an intermediate state between death and rebirth. Meanwhile, ‘a false chronicle of a handful of truths’ is quite an apt description for an impressionistic view of one’s life, isn’t it?
Like Silverio, Iñárritu started off in the Mexican media industry and found phenomenal success in the United States. In Bardo, a major concern is Mexican identity vis-à-vis mass migration to the United States to escape violence and poverty and find hope, employment, and, hopefully, home.
The artistic integrity
Bardo also questions an artist’s integrity and whether they are, by default, vampiric.
While Silverio has made a name in the United States through his documentaries involving Mexico’s poverty and violence, his teenage son wonders aloud: “I don’t get it… how is this representing you?” In an earlier scene, Luis (Francisco Rubio), a popular television host, and, once, Silverio’s ex-colleague, calls him “entitled bougie bastard on a mission to portray misery and poverty and society’s outcasts”. Luis points out that Silverio used to make “TV ads for capitalism” but “all of sudden you’re an artist”. (Iñárritu began his career as an advertising filmmaker). Seeing Silverio not respond to his accusations on live television, Luis notes how Silverio keeps pontificating for “gringos” but here he clams up.
After Luis’ verbal assault, Silverio returns home to his wife Lucia (Griselda Siciliani) and muses: “I go around seeking approval from people who despise me”. The moping and the self-involved musings make Silverio Guido’s lost sibling. In fact, several moments in Bardo are a mirror image of scenes from 81/2, starting with the openings: both Guido and Silverio are mid-air.
In 81/2, Guido is consulting a film critic about his ideas for a film that is self-referential and autobiographical, like 81/2 itself! The critic wonders, “Why piece together the tatters of your life — the vague memories, the faces… the people you never knew how to love?” — exactly how 81/2 unfolds. Cut to Bardo, where Luis critiques Silverio’s docu-fiction film, the eponymous False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, calling it “pretentious” and a “mishmash of pointless scenes” that are “pointlessly oneiric to cover your mediocre writing” — exactly what Bardo feels like.
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Bardo currently has a 59% critics’ rating on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, Iñárritu’s lowest score for a film on the website till date. Interestingly, the audience score is at 71% for a film that is seemingly complex and inaccessible. Possibly, the Mexican audience readily connected to the film’s themes and references. It hasn’t won any major award yet, which is perplexing for a film that’s at least stunning at a technical level: Darius Khondji’s breathtaking cinematography alone should draw popular attention. Filmmaker Paul Schrader said as much on Facebook: “Even though this was financed by Netflix, I sensed it was a film which should be seen in a theater without interruption… It’s a magisterial work and deserves to be seen in a sanctified theatrical setting.”
Bardo also comes amidst a slew of autobiographical films this year: Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans being the most discussed and Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun the most acclaimed. Somewhere, James Gray’s Armageddon Time, also shot by Khondji, got lost. Bardo’s ambitions and filmmaking, in comparison to these films, are, quite frankly, audacious and cutting-edge, and it’s saddening to consider that this film didn’t make a dent on the cinephilic radar this year.
