Bardo: fatuous chronicle of a handful of truths

• Reviewed at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival

Write about what you know, goes the old adage, and on the evidence of Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), Mexican writer/director Alejandro G. Iñárritu knows a lot about the woes of being incredibly successful and has seen Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963).

The film opens with a series of interconnecting dreamlike vignettes. The first takes the point of view of esteemed Mexican journalist and documentarian Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) as he runs through the desert and leaps high into the air, chasing his shadow as it passes below him. Then Silverio’s wife is having a baby, but the baby requests to be placed back in the womb, so back it goes. Others follow, each scene visually arresting, usually expressing some kind of surreally witty idea until they begin to coalesce into a narrative.

Silverio is being feted in Mexico in the run-up to receiving a prestigious award in the US, where he is partly based. But even as the situation becomes clearer, the dream logic remains. Time and place are bent and jiggled. Silverio participates in a talk show that turns out to be imaginary. Sometimes he speaks in voiceover but the other characters can hear him: “Move your mouth when you speak,” his mother tells him. Episodes in Mexican history are played out in front of him and the American ambassador to Mexico prepares a possible deal to sell the Baja of California to Amazon, an intriguing satirical subplot that the film allows to float away. During a party scene, while everyone is dancing to the live band, Silverio dances to a different soundtrack, the isolated vocal track of David Bowie singing ‘Let’s Dance’. You see, he is literally dancing to a tune in his head; marching to his own drum.

A key player in the Mexican invasion of Hollywood (see also Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro), Iñárritu has won critical and commercial success, including Academy Awards. His films have always been visually striking and formally ambitious, and Bardo is no exception. Cinematographer Darius Khonji’s beautifully lit, wide-angle cinematography includes no shortage of impressive long mobile shots; at its best, Bardo approaches the immersive qualities of VR. From the sound and production design to the editing to the soundtrack, the film’s technical aspects are exemplary. But as the three-hour film plods ever onward, the question begins to nag: in the service of what?

Iñárritu and co-screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone give us a very familiar character in a very familiar situation. The portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man has given us not just 8½ but all its imitators, from Stardust Memories (1980) to La Grande Bellezza (2013). Cacho brings his own weary charm, but he’s wearing Sean Penn’s suit from The Tree of Life (2011) and Marcello Mastroianni’s sunglasses. His character might not have directed The Revenant (2015) but he has two children – a boy and a girl – like Iñárritu; has received the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, like Iñárritu; and has an ambivalent relationship with Mexico, having for the most part achieved success abroad – like Iñárritu.

Just in case the audience suspects narcissism, the film gets in there first: several characters criticise Silverio for his egotism, his self-obsession, his privilege, his imposter syndrome and so on. But there’s something of the humblebrag in these criticisms, and the most extended attack he sustains is from a former friend with a successful chat show who comes over as embittered and compromised. It’s not so much honest self-appraisal as an attempt to defang and critic-proof the film, as he did with Lindsay Duncan’s character in Birdman (2014). The political history of Mexico, with its inequality and pain, is rendered through visual conceits which have the power and the glibness of a really good commercial. The missing, for instance, are portrayed when people suddenly start collapsing in a busy street in Mexico City. When Silverio asks a woman what happened to her, she replies: “You don’t want to know.” And indeed, the film really doesn’t.

Ultimately, Iñárritu has created an accomplished film and a fitfully breathtaking experience. But Bardo throws out so many ideas precisely because it has nothing specific to say. It is the cinematic equivalent of daydreaming about your own funeral and how everyone will miss you once you’re gone. It is a gloriously rendered fantasy; a gold-plated opportunity to gaze at a filmmaker’s navel.