In a career filled with near-unwavering success, including Best Picture and Best Director wins for “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “BARDO: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,” the Mexican auteur’s latest film, a personal surrealist trip, is his most divisive. Critics of the film have accused “Bardo” of being “exhausting,” “shallow,” and “self-indulgent.”
Of course, Iñárritu isn’t the only director to excavate his life for deeper meaning. Steven Speilberg did so with “The Fabelmans,” James Gray with “Armageddon Time,” Charlotte Wells and “Aftersun,” and Elegance Bratton and “The Inspection.” And that’s just this year. From its vast scope, indelible aesthetics, internal fears, and psychological machinations, Iñárritu’s distinctive vision stands out from the rest.
“Bardo” concerns Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) a Mexican journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles on the verge of accepting a prestigious American award. For Silverio, the honor awakens deeper concerns. From his perspective, which defies physical logic and temporal rationality, we witness his most painful memories — the heartbreak he and his wife (Griselda Siciliani) experienced when they lost their child — his insecurities and doubts about his own Mexicaness, the racism doled out by an imperialist American government, and the historical bloody empire building by colonialist powers that still haunt him today. Through swirling visuals and biting humor, Iñárritu uses the Silverio character to process his real-life worries and wounds.
It’s difficult to imagine how a film told with so much honesty, so much self-deprecation, and such self-interrogation, thereby revealing the faults of its creator, could be deemed “exhausting,” “shallow,” or “self-indulgent.” Iñárritu offers a complex narrative, told with a gusto reminiscent of Italian auteur Federico Fellini and Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges that pokes and prods, explicating unacknowledged realities by virtue of an intellectually freeing dreamscape, while confounding and challenging the viewer to inspect their hand in furthering racist, classist, and xenophobic power dynamics.
Iñárritu spoke with The Playlist to talk about the crafting of the film’s ambitious set pieces, the use of humor to give voice to agonizing memories, and the treacherous balance filmmakers of color must strike to tell their stories.
The Playlist: This film has so many surreal images; when you were formulating this movie, did you begin with specific images to match emotional beats, or did the words on the page lead you to the visuals?
Alejandro G Iñárritu: I would say none of them. I think it was very weird and unique, and a new process for me to work on, Robert, because basically, this time, with the script, when I was cooking the idea with Nicolás Giacobone, it was not meant to be in a more conventional storytelling structure. It was meant to be more of an emotional or mental landscape of a character in different free sequences, with different atmospheres and feelings and reflections that could be explored. So in a way, what I think was the only center of gravity for this, with the script, or individually and as a whole, was the emotional gravity of it. It was the concept of being radical in telling the story from not a rational perspective, but from the unconscious point of view of the character and to make people feel what he was going through. So that was kind of where we departed, conceptually, to build the whole thing.
I read that you didn’t give the cast the script beforehand. Have you done that before and what further freedom did it provide you doing it this time?
This was the first time that I didn’t want the cast to read the script because I didn’t find that it would be a useful thing for them to read. You know, I think I was trying to liberate them from the rational process and the construction of a character, especially Daniel. In the end, Daniel did read the script once, and I asked him not to rationalize and not to build any character based on prejudice or rational decisions.
He brought his own emotional baggage, his own relation with his father, his kids, his losses, his identity, and he worked with that. What I liked about that, and that is what we asked, is that he not react to anything, but just respond. Which is different. Because this is kind of a ghostly presence of a guy that is having a lucid dream.
So he’s dreaming, or he’s aware that he’s dreaming, so when you are dreaming, you are just floating like a ghost, and you are observing your own thoughts and your own emotions and your own life and your own stupidity. You can be navigated, but when you’re in a dream you’re just observing things. So that was the reason I didn’t want them to have a lot of information. Because it’ll be useless. It will actually be against the atmosphere that I was trying to create.
You mentioned it a little bit, what made Daniel so successful at playing toward the atmosphere?
I think what it really requires, and I think Daniel did an amazing job, Robert, was his honesty. The possibility and the ability, thanks to his meditation practices, of being aware and present at the moment. And that sounds very easy. But as you know, with acting, and I have worked with the best actors in the world and I respect so much what they do, it’s very difficult to create and build a character and transform it. But what was required of Daniel here, which I found to be at an extremely other level of things, was to listen, be honest and respond to what is going on. When you have a lot of lighting around you, technical stuff, and 30 people watching you, to be honest and to be present and to be sensitive, it’s extremely, extremely difficult. And I think that’s what Daniel did.
I love the vastness of the battle scene at Chapultepec Castle. It’s so elaborate, multilayered, and visually dense. How long did it take to block the whole sequence?
What we did was rehearse a lot in a park, just to set up exactly that, because they were kids, not stunts or professional [actors]. With the stunt coordinator, he was training them. We rehearsed that. We went to the location to figure out the station and the shots. I storyboard every shot and every detail. This Saturday, there will be an exhibition where I will show all of the storyboards, which were done by the Mexican painter, Edgar Clemente. Every shot was pre-planned, pre-produced, blocked and rehearsed. So yeah, it took me like two years to put together this film, and a lot of discipline and precision went into it.
The interview continues on Page 2