If you ever questioned it before, let “Bardo” — wordily subtitled ‘or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,’ as was the director’s wont with 2014’s “Birdman” — lay your queries to rest: Alejandro Iñárritu really, really loves Fellini. He’s not the only one, naturally: comparisons to “8 ½” are par for the course whenever a filmmaker comes out with a notionally autobiographical work, as with Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory” in 2019. ‘Bardo’ is the closest facsimile, nevertheless, since the hellspawn musical remake known as “Nine.”
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It’s post-Oscars Iñárritu with a chunky Netflix budget, manifestly doing whatever he wants, conjuring a derivative dreamscape piloted by an avatar protagonist with a Fellini-esque love for suits and glasses. We see the filmmaker in two modes, at once at his most visually self-indulgent, blindfoldedly pulling visual metaphors out of a sack, yet at times compellingly curious. It’s when he steps somewhat out of the frame from the three-hour fantastical epic (press materials dub it a comedy, but I presumably missed the jokes) to explore the histories of his native Mexico and his guilt as a famous expat in the country that once pillaged his homeland, that it grabs you; it’s a shame, then, that these moments are so sparing.
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We begin with death as life as death, as journalist-filmmaker Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho, made up to look remarkably like his director) witnesses the birth of his child — well, sorta. “He wants to go back in,” says one of the doctors in attendance, to the toot of whimsical horns. “He says the world is too fucked up.” And so the baby is pushed legs-first back into his mother’s womb, a first surprising vignette among surprising vignettes that betrays two things: first, this is what we might dub an unreliable narrator, and secondly, Iñárritu has truly lost his chill. There’s a shock-jock element here, carried with wild farce, compounded by the next scene, which sees mom Lucia (Griselda Siciliani) dozily wander through the hospital halls tracked by a thirty-odd foot umbilical cord which, of course, gets caught in a pair of double doors. Right.
If what you expected was a linear chronology in the vein of “The Revenant” or “Birdman,” you can park that at the door. This is, for better or worse, the wildest of wild rides: a blended patchwork of loosely related memories, nightmares, dreams, and realities, some of them deeply felt, others incoherent. There’s a nexus point around which they all orbit and intersect, but to reveal that would be to ruin a first watch — even if the eventual payoff is underwhelming.
There’re more juvenile bodily nasties, reminding one of Owen Kline’s recent Cannes debutant “Funny Pages,” albeit not… well, funny. In one scene, in which Silverio recalls or imagines himself as a small wean (albeit with Cacho’s full-sized noggin and beard: think the giant head cheat from “GoldenEye” on the Nintendo 64) masturbating under the covers, a voluptuous woman appears to him. Taking off her bra, her nipples are revealed to be fried eggs, cooked sunny side up. Little Silverio takes to sucking up the center as if drinking his mother’s milk: it’s an all the more queasy image than the reverse birth, not least for the Oedipus of it all, owed largely to the puss-yellow trail of yolk he leaves on her belly. A generous read would be that it lends sex, in that context, a pointedly child-like quality, but one gets the sense Iñárritu just thought it was a funny image.
Where it might work less as a history of the self, moments shine through where Iñárritu takes that personal lens to a broader colonial history of Mexico, though still played through Brooks-ian farce. Having lived in Los Angeles for fifteen years — as Iñárritu has himself for the last twenty-one, a point with which he opens a director’s statement distributed to the press — Silverio-cum-Alejandro is curious about his place in the world. There’s a sense of the mid-to-later life crisis as if he’s trying to re-discover himself through geography, a perpetual nomad still struggling to define “home.” His children, played by newcomers Íker Sánchez Solano and Ximena Lamadrid — the former a particular delight, though both do very well indeed — prefer to speak English, having largely grown up in the States; Silverio, for his part, initially seems embarrassed of his heritage. What occurs, then, is a rich homecoming, oscillating between the present and the past, as with any vivid dream: here, it feels as though Ińárritu’s ego gives way to his heart.
Visually, too, the landscape — the movie’s dominant dream-state warping nature and melting together biomes — lends the picture a spectacle quality where metaphor might come up short. Take the early moment where a metro car is caught underwater as if an oversized fish bowl or a later scene in which Silverio’s imagined home pools with glistening Mexican sands: a greater coalescence of production design and visual effects is rare to see.
But here’s the thing: for all of the visual treats on display and for the moving moments that are better left unspoiled, nobody thought to withhold this director’s greater indulgences. And that is a shame — because when ‘Bardo’ hits the softer note it strives for, it’s really something to behold. [C+]
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