Bardo
A filmmaker in limbo
Several well known directors have made autobiographical movies this year: The Fabelmans by Steven Spielberg, Armaggedon Time by James Grey, and Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, by Alejandro González Iñárritu. The first two are childhood memoirs. Bardo is an allegory of the creator as a grown man, which puts it in precarious territory. It takes a certain amount of guts — or self-delusion — to use oneself as a subject, unless you are Woody Allen and you make fun of yourself. In 8 1/2, Fellini, an artist with a profoundly wise and fecund imagination, created a world, he created a Rome that took hold in people’s imaginations, a visual and emotional landscape so unique and original that it now lives independently of his own story and is an enduring classic.
This is not the case with Bardo, a gigantic misstep from a filmmaker that should be maturing, not regressing into adolescent self-absorption. There is no doubt that González Iñárritu can make quality movies, as he has demonstrated with Amores Perros, Birdman, and The Revenant. It is also clear that his sensibility runs towards blunt, sentimental exaggeration. Choosing to make an allegory about himself is sheer hubris.
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma says more about the reality of Mexico in its opening scene (two maids cleaning dog shit in a middle class home) than this excruciatingly long movie in its hours of symbolic pontification about Mexican history and reality. In Roma, Cuarón recreates his childhood, yet he doesn’t focus on himself, but on his relationship with his maid from his point of view as a child. This gives him enough distance to make an intimate, personal story into something bigger and more profound. The opposite happens in Bardo; for all its allegorical and cheesy surreal displays, Iñárritu does not have the imagination required to shape his preoccupations into something outside of himself and fails to create a reality independent of his own navel-gazing.
In Bardo, an old friend and colleague of the protagonist Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, heroic in a thankless job), eviscerates the documentary that Silverio makes, for which he has won an award. That documentary is the movie we are seeing, (ooh, meta!) and everything the friend says applies: this film is pretentious, overcooked, obvious, full of leaden symbolism and clichés: a terrible, solipsistic mess. If the filmmakers knew this to be the case, why didn’t they fix it? Metafiction is not an excuse.
The idea of a man in limbo between two countries and two cultures is promising. The attempt to create a seamless visual dreamlike flow of consciousness of the character is striking, the problem is that the character is not at all interesting. It would have been far more illuminating to see the actual reality of the Mexican director in Hollywood. How is he treated there? How is he treated in Mexico? This would help understand the protagonist’s inner conflicts. Iñárritu claims that the movie is about certain truths yet the first thing that is not believable is that Silverio, a character that is more than loosely based on him, is a journalist. There is nothing in his life, demeanor or actions that convinces us that this is his job. Everything rings fake.
The fact that someone can suffer devastating loss doesn’t make their story dramatically interesting. This is why biopics tend to fail. An eventful life is not enough. It needs to be filtered through the elements of dramatic storytelling: what is the obstacle, what does the character want, why can’t they get it, who is their nemesis, what is the arc? Aristotle came up with this stuff over 2000 years ago. It still works, but it is nowhere to be found in this tone poem about the director’s ego. He manages to make the loss of a baby cringeworthy in his insistence in turning everything into a labored, obvious metaphor. This movie feels like the ideas that come to someone even before they attempt to put them into a first draft. Immature, all over the place, both half baked and overcooked. Understandable from a rookie; baffling from someone with Iñárritu’s chops.
It is a cringe fest: between Silverio whining about how dreadful fame and success are, his insufferable family, the cheesy visual effects, the leaden visual symbolism of the disappeared literally falling on the street, and Silverio having a ridiculous conversation with Hernán Cortés a top a literal mountain of Indians, not to mention a grotesque scene with his father where he turns into the body of a boy but keeps his adult head, I wonder how anyone watching this 10-car pile-up will last beyond the first 20 minutes streaming it on Netflix. At least on the big screen you can appreciate the cinematography (by Darius Khondji), the sound and the excellent editing. You can focus on the craftsmanship and tune out the story. At home, who needs the aggravation? Which also made me wonder how no one told the director to shave at least 45 minutes off, why they gave him millions to embarrass himself in such spectacular fashion. Who thought that this was a good idea? My guess is that Netflix, even with its successful forays into world cinema production, did not understand the lack of nuance of this movie. How, after having greenlit Roma, they could not see the difference in quality and content between the two films is beyond me. Perhaps they thought that the two Mexican, Oscar-winning directors are interchangeable. They are very obviously not. Very different sensibilities. Hubris.
The most remarkable scene takes place at the California Dancing Club, a legendary old school dance club in Mexico City, as Silverio dances in slow motion to an a capella version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”. It is a magical moment, a taste of Iñárritu’s talent, wasted here in his fruitless search for meaning.
