Movie Details
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truth (2022)
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, and Ximena Lamadrid
Movie type: Comedy/Documentary
Release date: 27 October 2022
IMDB Rating: 6.7/10
Languages: Spanish and English
Duration: 2 Hour 39 Minutes
Trailer
Synopsis
No one from the editorial team wanted to write it. No one. At the same time, it is difficult to find a director who would score as well as the Mexican native Alejandro González Iñárritu in the last decade. In 2014 and 2015, he won four Oscars for the powerful duo Birdman and The Revenant:, and two years later won a special Oscar for the engaging VR short Carne y Arena. This is not at all a bad business card for a director who decided to make a film in his native Mexico after two decades. So the problem is rather the fact that you can now watch the new movie, which had its official premiere at the Venice festival, on Netflix.
Perhaps only Alfonso Cuarón’s Oscar-winning Roma can be considered the undisputed success of Netflix’s collaboration with established creators. However, Iñárritu will not be included alongside his longtime friend, his work, on the contrary, is among the biggest disappointments of this year.
A number of the above-mentioned works have been criticized for introspection and an uncritical approach to personal topics, which unfortunately also applies unconditionally to Iñárritu’s new work. Although the director returned to the editing room after the Venice premiere and cut two dozen minutes from the footage, the version on Netflix still reaches a monstrous 160 minutes, during which we have to wander through the not-so-attractive corners of the author’s unconscious. In interviews, Iñárritu himself stated that this time he wanted to look more inside himself than at the world around him, which is nice, but hardly bearable for the audience.
Iñárritu’s alter ego is the journalist and documentarian Silverio, who became famous for following people on the margins of society, mainly Mexicans fleeing across the border in pursuit of the American dream. However, the acclaimed artist lives in his ivory tower, does not have enough contact with the problems of ordinary people, and as part of a midlife crisis, he ceases to understand the world around him. In this mood, he is also to accept a prestigious journalistic award from the Americans, which many of his relatives consider a betrayal of the Mexican people.
We then follow the battle of a privileged man with his ego through surreal scenes where we cannot be sure where reality ends and dreams or memories begin. After all, this is also reflected in the title of the film: Bardo is the state between death and rebirth in Buddhism, and the film’s subtitle “false chronicle of several truths” goes hand in hand with Iñárrita’s claim that autobiographies lie, while fiction can better capture reality thanks to its freer manipulation of facts. This is certainly an interesting and meaningful concept, but unfortunately in the hands of an ambitious filmmaker enchanted by his views, it becomes a dangerous weapon that overwhelms even the viewer willing to play a challenging game with a strange combination of bizarreness and boredom.
This time, Iñárritu replaced his regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki with the experienced Dario Khondji, whose captivating images and opulent camera movements can keep even the viewer who is tired of the lack of clarity of Iñárritu’s narration on television. Contemplating the search for truth in the film medium or distinguishing the author from his work is sometimes playful, but it never becomes so formally enthralling or intellectually intoxicating that it hits a person. So if you miss the work of the recently hit director this time, you won’t miss anything. Unfortunately, his longest film so far is also his worst.
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