Venice Dispatch – Bardo

When filmmakers take a break from telling other people’s stories and draw inspiration from their own past, the result can be pure magic. Speaking of just the last few years, Pedro Almodóvar’s PAIN AND GLORY and Alfonso Cuarón’s ROMA come to mind. Now it’s time for 5-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu to look back, reflect and deliver his cinematic memoirs with BARDO (OR FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS), his first narrative feature since THE REVENANT (2015). Premiering in competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival, the film didn’t quite floor me the way those other two did, but it sure is a 3-hour directorial tour-de-force, showcasing epic filmmaking at its most sincerely, messily personal.

Iñárritu’s alter ego Silverio (played by Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a Mexican journalist/documentarian who’s found success in the US and been living in LA for 20 years. To prepare his acceptance speech for a tribute award, he finds himself thinking about where he came from and tumbles down a mad rabbit hole that stretches as far back as the Spanish colonial era. In the process, we meet Silverio’s wife and two teenage children, learn about their experience emigrating to America and grappling with their sense of identity. We accompany them on a trip back to Mexico and feel the cultural shock of the Returned. Then we see them re-enter their chosen home up north, greeted by the casual reminder that they’ll always be outsiders. Scattered in between are many fantasy sequences involving Silverio’s dead parents, unborn child, his son’s pet axolotls, reenactments of the Mexican-American war, a conversation with the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés… you get the idea. While one can hardly speak of a coherent plot that connects the dots, all these events and milestones eventually do coalesce into something approaching a stream of consciousness – impossibly tangled and illuminating all at once.

Unlike ROMA, whose scope was strictly limited to Cuarón’s childhood memories, BARDO goes beyond those to focus on Iñárritu’s immigrant experience as well as the history of those crossing Mexico’s borders. Some of the anecdotes featured in the film may seem random/redundant at first, but as we gradually realize, century-old questions of ownership, of belonging ultimately shape our understanding of culture and heritage, and are among the most personal questions we can ask ourselves. Could the screenplay still have been edited down to a more concise form? Probably. But then there’s something to be said for the sheer ambition of the undertaking and the cumulative, delirium-inducing effect of such a kaleidoscopic chronicle, too.

MVP of the project is Iñárritu the director. Instead of going quiet and intimate like Almodóvar and Cuarón did, he brings out the fireworks. Following a gorgeously poetic, dialogue-free opening scene, we land in an operating theater where something you’ve never seen at a movie birth takes place. It’s completely bananas and sets the tone for the next 170 minutes. You know then and there to expect comedy, fantasy, an unreliable/fanciful narrative and wild directorial flourishes. All of these come about in quick succession. We get a flooded subway train that somehow transitions to an apartment under water. Characters fall asleep and wake up in different times, yet carry on without missing a beat. Dreams and memory soon bleed into each other and it’s quite a trip.

Netflix obviously gave Iñárritu a huge budget to realize his vision and you can see every cent on screen. Elaborate sets and props are created and there are a number of massive set pieces that highlight the director’s killer instincts for composition and choreography. There’s a scene in the last hour which sees Silverio walking through the streets when, all around him, people start to drop dead like flies, leaving a trail of bodies that leads him to a grisly mountain of corpses on an empty square. It’s a striking sight that surprises again when the centerpiece transforms into something else, revealing a new, meta meaning to everything you’ve just seen. They way Iñárritu plays with the viewer’s perception and switches between dramatic and comedic tones feels easy, organic. There’s music to the flow of his direction.

Cacho also deserves to be singled out for his grounded, richly human lead performance. This role requires him to relive all the emotions one goes through from cradle to grave, and he did it winningly, giving this often crazy film its beating heart. Legendary DP Darius Khondji is predictably superb, imbuing the meticulously lit landscapes and interiors with quiet grandeur. There’s also a prolonged dance scene where Khondji’s camera weaves in, out, over and around the crowd like nobody’s business. Both the fluency and grace of the camera operation off-the-charts impressive.

As a work of dizzying virtuosity and surprise, BARDO mirrors the rollercoaster ride that is life itself. It took me a minute to get into its groove, but once I did, it really moved.