This might be an odd thing to say about a feature film, but some genuinely transporting moments in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo recall the immersive approach of acclaimed third-person games like Red Dead Redemption. I make this comparison because that’s how master cinematographer Darius Kondji (Se7en) draws us into the world of the film. It all feels like being inside a dream. I initially assumed it was Innaritu’s frequent collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki orchestrating this—the smooth way the camera follows the characters, pans from one direction to another, or inches calmly forward to get a close-up. And all those enchanting wide frames… To quote Andrei Tarkovsky, “Poetic cinema!”
Bardo is one character’s emotional journey treated like a surreal epic, much like in the tradition of Federico Fellini; and Innaritu does it beautifully, more so than, I would dare to say, Paolo Sorrentino’s last few works that are in a similar vein. And the film’s full title—Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths—begins to make more sense once you’ve seen what Innaritu was trying to achieve. That said, I’m not sure I fully grasped what Bardo wants to say, which is fine. After all, it’s not one of those films that throw moderately bizarre images at you just for the sake of it. A lot of it makes sense. Innaritu has never been an inaccessible filmmaker—at least, that’s how I’ve always felt about his work.
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Iker Sanchez Solano, Francisco Rubio
Streamer: Netflix
Aside from delivering a fantastic audio-visual experience, Bardo bears numerous layers, all of which might take multiple revisits to comprehend fully. To give you a sense of its weirdness (the good kind, of course), take the opening, for instance. A first-person view of a man, Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), looking at his sprinting shadow that slowly begins to dim as it ‘flies’ to greater heights, repeated a couple of times until we see the entire horizon. It’s then cut to a shot of Silverio waiting outside a hospital delivery room. The doctor informs him and his wife that the newborn baby wants to return to the womb because it thinks the “world is too f***** up.” How does the baby know that? Did it tell the doctors? Apparently, it did. You care about logic in cinema? Well, it’s irrelevant here. It didn’t matter to me because I agreed with the baby. Request granted. The doctors push the baby back in. We later see Silverio and his wife leave the hospital while the long, bloody umbilical cord trails behind her. You might wonder what it’s all about; fret not, you’ll get the answer soon. When we finally get to it, it brings much emotion. Innaritu’s vision lends it a sense of divinity.
I watched the entirety of Bardo with awe and amusement. It is just the kind of comforting film I wanted to see when going through an existential crisis. And by ‘comforting,’ I don’t mean that it offers solutions to all your questions. It simply wants to tell you that this is how life is, and you can’t do much about it other than simply accept it. It’s a sentiment echoed in a scene where Silverio talks to his father’s ghost in a scene that recalls the men’s room conversation from The Shining, but without the creepy vibe. His father tells him, “Life is just a series of senseless events. You just have to surrender to them.”
The two abovementioned scenes only make up a tiny segment of Bardo. Innaritu delves into a lot more in what is seemingly a profoundly personal work. It’s also a cause for minor celebration to see him return to his native tongue after Biutiful. The Spanish language’s musical quality is apt for electrically charged dialogues and animated expressions. The latter is especially true of Francisco Rubio, as Luis, who represents every journalist who panders to a certain group. He is the vain, self-obsessed kind of journalist who says only the most appropriate and politically correct things on social media but has a shady offline personality. When an extremely theatrical Luis tells Silverio to do his documentary “straight” instead of using others’ struggles to glorify himself, it becomes an organic, spite-filled conversation. But Innaritu manages to infuse a little bit of unreal aspect into this situation when Luis literally loses his voice when Silverio tells him he is sick and tired of hearing it.
Aside from the conflicts of the titular Mexican artist, Bardo also grapples with his constant urge to preserve ties with his true identity. Contradictory feelings pop up when, in one notable scene, Silverio encounters a Mexican security official at an airport who tells him that he can’t call the U.S. his “home,” even when the former argues that he “lives” there. Bardo also feels like the story of a man at the end of his life travelling through his memories. Occasionally, the film’s illusion-shattering quality recalls the work of Mel Brooks. There is space for dark humour, too, notably in the portions where historical events magically merge with contemporary ones. However, Innaritu is careful not to dilute moments of deep introspection with comedy.
Bardo also contains some of the most stunning scene transitions I’ve seen since anything imagined by Steven Spielberg. One memorable instance has Silverio crawling out of a water-filled metro train, only to end up on the floor of his home. Some scenarios have a nightmarish quality until they are interrupted to reveal that Silverio is ‘living’ inside his documentary. Or is he really? The ending makes us rethink the entire film from a whole new perspective, akin to John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967).
Bardo comes from Nicolás Giacobone, who penned Birdman and Biutiful, and has seemingly become Innaritu’s go-to man for stories about conflicted, soul-searching men. Bardo is, in my assessment, the best of the lot. It would make a great companion piece for Birdman, but I would pick the latter for its wholesome quality.
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