Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades

Alejandro González Iñárritu (2022)

The Buddhist idea of bardo, the intermediate state between the end of one life and rebirth into the next, became better known in the West in 2017 through George Saunders’ prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo.  The concept is well represented at this year’s London Film Festival too.  An off-the-wall cultural studies professor in Noah Baumbach’s White Noise expounds a theory that the American supermarket is a kind of bardo.  It’s also the headline word in another long, pleased-with-itself title from Alejandro González Iñárritu (at least this one – unlike Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) – stops short of the misplaced brackets).  Introducing his new magnum opus (174 minutes) from the stage of the Royal Festival Hall Southbank Centre, Iñárritu came across as charming and modest – qualities rarely in evidence in the films he makes.  In that respect, Bardo is no different from its six predecessors but it’s worse than them, thanks to its incoherence.  To be more precise, what I saw of it is worse.  I walked out about halfway through – a Festival first for me.

Bardo’s protagonist is Silverio Gama, an internationally successful journalist and documentary film-maker, who returns from the US to his native country of Mexico, where he experiences some kind of existential crisis.  Bardo’s auteur is an internationally successful film-maker who returned to his native Mexico to make this picture – the first feature he’s made there since his first (Amores perros (2000)).  Silverio has been lionised in North America; in his own country, he’s considered part national hero, part ‘gringo arse-licker’.  In Hollywood, Alejandro González Iñárritu won the Academy Award for Best Director in consecutive years (for Birdman and The Revenant (2015)).  I don’t know how he’s viewed in Mexico but, like Silverio, he’s married with a daughter and a son – and is just about the same age as Daniel Giménez Cacho, who plays the lead in Bardo.  Iñárritu has made clear in publicity that this is for him a very personal film.  It’s hard not to see Silverio Gama as the director’s alter ego – and Bardo as heavily influenced by Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963).  Silverio is anxious about the reception of his latest piece of work and the challenge of creating the next one.  At least some of his existential crisis is expressed in the form of bad dreams.

The film’s opening sequence shows the shadow of a man against a parched Mexican landscape.  The shadow repeatedly runs and tries to fly before disappearing into the landscape as the camera pulls back.  It’s a strong image, despite the Birdman connotations.  Next we see Silverio waiting in the corridor of a hospital, where his wife Lucia (Griselda Siciliani) is in labour.  The doctor who delivers her baby picks him up moments after the birth.  The newborn seems to want to communicate with the doctor, who holds him close to listen then informs Lucia that her son thinks this is too ‘fucked up’ a world to live in.  The baby prefers to return to the womb and promptly gets stuffed back inside Lucia – an arresting idea, another arresting image.  Later on, while Silverio and Lucia are having oral sex, the baby interrupts by deciding to be born again but, as before, has second thoughts.  When Silverio says, ‘He’s trying to tell us something’, Lucia replies, ‘How can he?  He’s a baby’ – though she didn’t say that to the hospital doctor.  It emerges that the baby represents Silverio and Lucia’s actual son, who died at one day old – a tragedy still painful to them and to their two other children, twenty-something Camila (Ximena Lamadrid) and teenager Lorenzo (Iker Sánchez Solano).

As these neonatal details suggest, it’s not easy to get a fix on the shifting levels of reality in Bardo. You accept the fantastic conceit of the newborn baby conveying verbal messages but then struggle to understand why his mother accepts this the first time but queries it the second time it happens.  In his introduction to the screening, Iñárritu explained that Bardo was constructed from ‘personal memories’ and suggested that these would ‘communicate’ because they were ‘to an extent universal’.  I don’t know if Iñárritu and his wife have endured the experience of losing a baby; viewers who have may identify with this element of Bardo.  But nothing else that I saw of it bears out what Iñárritu claimed for the film.  Since very few people can relate to the level of celebrity and success that Silverio enjoys, a good deal of what happens is the opposite of universal.  Iñárritu also stressed that Bardo was sensorial and encouraged us to lose ourselves in it.  In that case, why did he and his co-writer Nicolás Giacobone (who also worked with Iñárritu on the screenplays of Biutiful (2010) and Birdman) write so much pumped-up showoff dialogue – presumably to be ignored as we give ourselves over to bombastic imagery (the cinematographer is Darius Khondji) and matching insistent music (by Bryce Dessner)?   Are the hordes of refugee peasants and the staged reconstruction of combat in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 meant to be just part of the immersive experience?  (Unimmersed, I keot thinking how much the film must have cost to make.  Since it’s a Netflix job, the production budget figure presumably won’t be released.)

A particularly ear-catching passage of writing arrived just as I was preparing to leave.  Luis (Francisco Rubio), Silverio’s former friend, now hosts a trashy TV chat show.  Silverio offends him by appearing on the show and declining to speak.  Luis gives him what for, rubbishing Silverio’s work as pretentious, fancy and overlong – these have the ring of words that Iñárritu foresees will be used to deprecate Bardo.  (They might not seem obvious adjectives to describe documentary work rather than the ‘epic black comedy-drama’ (Wikipedia) that Bardo is; but since Iñárritu blurs the distinction between what his avatar puts on screen and what he sees in his mind’s eye, it’s hard to know what Silverio’s films consist of.)  The diatribe is aborted when Silverio tells Luis he’s sick of hearing his voice:  Luis’s lips continue to move but no sound comes out.  Although Iñárritu understands that he can’t emulate that, this outburst of knowingness was enough to keep me in my seat for a while.

I eventually walked after a dance (scored to David Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’) involving Silverio, Lucia, Camila, Lorenzo and lots of others in a crowded space.  There hasn’t been any dancing prior to this but it struck me as typical of the film.  It doesn’t express anything of what characters may be feeling or what Iñárritu feels about them.  All that comes across is the camera position, of bodies shot in close-up tight enough to ensure there’s no fluency (or even an interesting lack of fluency) in their movement.  Bardo is similar to 8½ in that your heart doesn’t exactly bleed for the predicament of the feted film-maker whose creative and personal travails the story depicts.  Although it would be insulting to Fellini’s picture to compare its merits with Bardo‘s, the two do also have in common a big dance sequence.  Fellini’s dance of life (complementing Bergman’s dance of death in The Seventh Seal (1957)) is the last and the best thing in his film.  Since Iñárritu has only a small fraction of Fellini’s flair and invention, there’s really no excuse for  Bardo‘s taking considerably longer than 8½ to do its work:  I decided the dance sequence should wrap up this movie too.

10 October 2022