I would not have taken Alejandro González Iñárritu for a Fellini type. His style is typically so much more dour and cynical, far from the bombast of La Dolce Vita or the sentiment of La Strada or 8½. But the latter especially seems to be a fundamental influence on the movie that might speak most personally for him of any in his career. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths -a title even more ostentatiously ridiculous than Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)- is not a movie much in the vein of other highly personal auteur projects this year like The Fabelmans or Armageddon Time, which create fairly obvious one-to-one parallels between artist and alter ego. Bardo keeps more ambiguous its’ resemblance to Iñárritu’s life story as it depicts the late career anxieties and surreal visions of a documentarian returning to Mexico after decades living in the States and in the midst of receiving a prestigious American award in journalism -the first Latin-American to do so. But of course though clearly not biographical, it doesn’t take much to note the parallels in that situation to a filmmaker returning to Mexican cinema for the first time in over twenty years off the back of making history as a Latin-American winning a prestigious American award in his field -twice!
The consciousness and effect of this plausible deniability is the films’ most overarching question. It’s right there in the title. How much are we supposed to take away as Iñárritu’s own “handful of truth” reflected in the “false chronicle”, and in that what is its’ result? What does Iñárritu let the film say about himself, and how does he choose to say it? Certainly it’s interesting that the film is clouded in a lot of nebulous or surreal imagery -that its’ subject is a man with a seeming tenuous grip on sanity, where his fantasy interconnects with and obscures reality. And yet his every reverie is full of blunt, abject symbolism related to his personal psyche or his historical-political preoccupations. Like of course he would imagine himself at a childs' size in a conversation with his father, or he would see the Battle of Chapultepec replayed at that Castle while touring around an envoy of the nation that won it -with whom he had just been discussing the colonialist underpinnings of the Mexican-American War. The visions aren’t in any way subtle and their imagery for how elaborate and beautiful, not terribly revealing -except for when it coincides with feelings of personal alienation from culture.
Silverio Gama is the name of the man who experiences these (no clue where ‘Bardo’ comes from), and he is played by veteran Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, who had memorably worked with both of Iñárritu’s friends Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro. Cacho’s performance is one of the movies’ strongest suits, he carries himself in every scene with a weathered demeanour but a still tangible spark of passionate fire. His ego and repressed anxieties are well-disguised as he drifts through each dreamlike situation and dose of realism alike, substituting the uncomfortable with his ideal for himself and his family. And Cacho draws out a pathos that isn’t always there in the somewhat cynical script. Certainly he understands Silverio’s struggle with cultural isolation and desire to empathize more with his Mexican identity. How this fits into the structure of the film might be overly direct, but the emotion is felt –his simultaneous desire for his English-dominant son to speak Spanish at home and appreciate his heritage, while being uniquely wary navigating the media scene within his home country, canceling a much-hyped appearance on a Mexican talk show hosted by an old colleague. The role of history looms large in his mind, particularly in Mexico’s relationship to the U.S., and he finds himself at various times identifying with both the conquered and conquerors, as Mexican-American War imagery gives way to Cortes sitting on an immense throne of Indigenous bodies.
It’s a fascinating complex, a curious psychological examination, and yet it often feels dry in Iñárritu’s hands. Because for as personal as the film might be he retains a characteristic emotional distance to the subject, and perhaps clouds the film too much in bleak satire or misery. Such is a scene at customs where Silverio’s immigration status is called into question divorced of any subtlety, or when he suffers a stroke on a Los Angeles subway that nobody cares to do anything about. Moments like these express a harshness out of keeping with the meditative air that Iñárritu seems otherwise to be going for. Even in fanciful reflection mode, he can’t help making dim statements on humanity that cast the world around Silverio as needlessly petty and cruel. At the same time, the movie is constructed with a sense of grandiosity, not entirely unbefitting given the technical craft, but out of touch with the rather rote observations made through Iñárritu’s commentary. His surreal narrative choices are compelling, but seem a touch wasted on such simple metaphors. Outside of the personal conflict and psychological musings on Silverio himself, the film has nothing much of interest to say. It’s where he loses that Fellini spark.
But the way he communicates his drabness is often captivating. The imagery Iñárritu employs in this movie is a lot: already I mentioned the sudden re-enactment of nineteenth century U.S. imperialism and the mountain of dead natives to represent Spanish colonial atrocities, but even in Silverio’s own sphere, strange anomalies are rendered. The great trauma for both him and his wife Lucia (Griselda Siciliani) was the death of their first son shortly after birth. We never see them dwell on the experience, but it recurs through his dreamscape in the premise of a child not wanting to be born –vividly, I might add. Twice Silverio imagines the minuscule baby being pushed back into his mothers’ birth canal, before it is later deposited on a beach to swim away like a small turtle in concert with the family at last spreading the ashes and letting his memory go. While the former scenes are tonally confused for the sake of strange visuals, this latter one is genuinely moving and meaningful. Such is the dichotomy for these visions that ripple in with or reflect reality in a gracefully nebulous way until the end.
And the beauty that touches them is the hand of Darius Khondji. The film opens on a breathtaking, hazy track through an aerial view of the desert and the shadow of a man who appears to be flying. Iñárritu doesn’t attempt any overt technical feat like on his last two movies, which makes Khondji’s long shots more intensifying, his dusk scenery more mesmerizing. Just the opening and closing sequences alone are more aesthetically tantalizing than most movies that have come out this year. When combined well with Iñárritu’s stronger dreamlike concepts and sharper visual instincts, it is fully astonishing.
Bardo is aided also in its’ effect by an illustrious score by Bryce Dessner that likewise provides a gravity the movie doesn’t fully earn. That’s a rough sentiment, the movie isn’t a failure. I think Iñárritu does express something personal here he hasn’t had licence to before. Where he does touch on those themes of national identity intertwined with personal, familial anxieties, the movie is highly fascinating –and I won’t deny its’ fluid reality does reach an effective catharsis. Whatever else, it is a transfixing piece and in its’ best moments Iñárritu’s most engaging outing since Babel! But those misfires of tone, reaches for cleverness, and a general atmosphere of unearned confidence make it a shaky movie in the least. The subtitle is also the name of Silverio’s pretentious docufiction project about asylum seekers –you’d think Iñárritu would have considered that before adding it to the title of his movie proper.
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