Professor Isaac Borg is invited to receive an honorary degree. On his way to the ceremony, he reflects on his life and the film becomes an associative sequence of memories, hallucinations and nightmares. He ends this journey of consciousness lying on his deathbed. Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 “Wild Strawberries,” which is his synopsis, set off a wave of stream-of-consciousness films, including influential works by Alain René and Federico Fellini. These are now joined by “Bardo: A False Record of a Handful of Truths”, for which the above summary, from the invitation to the deathbed, is also appropriate.
In the film by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, a Mexican journalist and documentarian named Silverio who lives with his family in Los Angeles, is about to receive a prestigious award. A few days before the ceremony he returns to his homeland and immerses himself in various memories, hallucinations and nightmares full of images of death. Some of them stem from his private pain, others are dedicated to political reflections on the history of Mexico as a conquered country – from the Spanish invasion in the 16th century, through the war with the USA in the 19th century to the takeover of Amazon in the present. Silverio’s dreams also include quite a few sleepy images that seem lifted directly from Fellini’s “½8” (the desert encounter with the old parents and the actress who complains that he didn’t cast her in his film), and they seem more like an imitation than a tribute. Like the Italian master, Iñárritu places on the screen imagined images of events from his own life (the death of his infant son), Only that, unlike him, his film does not form a cohesive work, but is experienced as a random collection of ideas hung on a clothesline.
Like his hero, Iñárritu, a Mexican filmmaker who achieved extraordinary international success, including winning four Oscars for “Birdman” and “The Man Born Again”, returns to his homeland after several years in the USA, and creates a kind of personal work of epic length (more than two and a half hours) and completely on budget Impersonal, which only an artist of his stature could afford. It’s the kind of cinematic adventure that has very low revenue potential, but Netflix invests in it for the prestige, and doesn’t seem to check the tassels.
Iñárritu’s visual talent is certainly evident on screen, but it is not enough to compensate for his limitations as a screenwriter. All the impressive images he created with the photographer Darius Kondji (“Seven Sins”), do not add up to a substantial text, and the whole is much smaller than the sum of its parts. The beautiful opening shot follows a shadow of a man (without the man) trying to fly through the desert. This is an original variation on the well-known desire of artists to spread their wings, as in the dream that opens “½8”. Later we find the complementary image of a terrible traffic jam in the desert, with which quite a few filmmakers have also played (Godard, Altman, Terry Gilliam, and again Fellini). Iñárritu adds a political layer to it, and combines it with a segment from Silverio’s experience when he shot a film about mass immigration to the United States.
There is in “Bardo” (poet, in Spanish) the self-irony of a successful director who flies first class to make films about the oppressed of the world. But this indication has also already been formulated in the films of other creators, and Iñárritu does not add a new layer to it. Another mystery that is thrown on the screen is Silverio’s, and the filmmaker behind him’s, struggles regarding his national identity – is he Mexican or American? Lots of extras were recruited to design this beat, and the mass choreography at the airport yields a beautiful moment. But the mountain gives birth to a mouse. In general, the film is paved with scenes with masses of extras, in the roles of young soldiers who are killed for nothing, women who fall in the street for a mysterious reason, and piles of corpses simulating the end of Mexico.
Iñárritu was accused of his film being a display of ego, and there is something in that. But there is no cinema without an ego. If only there was an authentic feeling emerging from these images that they stem from the torturous beatings of a man who truly reveals the hidden depths of his soul. On first viewing, the symbolism of the images is quite easily deciphered, and if there is an invisible depth in them, the film does not make you want to watch it again to look for it. Within the sequence, the intimate moments – such as a conversation with the old father and the farewell ceremony to the memory of the baby who died – are more effective.
After in “Birdman” Iñárritu planted an actor’s conversation with a theater critic who promises to kill his show, this time he combines Silverio’s meeting with a man who kills his film with harsh words designed to preempt the blow expected from critics of Iñárritu’s film. Where I did not find self-criticism is in the casting of Griselda Siciliani as the young wife (for many years) and the mother of Silverio’s (Daniel Jimenez Cacho) grown children. not only that. The fair Sicilian runs around the screen naked to seduce her aging husband and the men in the audience. When is enough?
2.5 stars/ Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu. With Daniel Jimenez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani. Mexico 2022, 160 min.