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| Courtesy of Netflix |
But instead of continuing to ascend into the pantheon of
becoming one of Tinseltown’s most gifted storytellers, Iñárritu has sharply dug
his heels in by pumping the brakes and with his first official Mexican
production in twenty-two years has transposed what soared in Birdman into
an elongated expression of artistic hubris with his new three-hour Netflix
surreal dark comedy Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. Whereas Birdman and The Revenant displayed
new ground being treaded for the director, Bardo shows him once again
stuck in a rut arguably going backwards.
Daniel Giménez Cacho plays Mexican documentary filmmaker and
journalist Silverio Gama who lives with his wife Lucia (Griselda Siciliani) and
young son. Upon returning from Los
Angeles to his native country to accept a prestigious film award, the film
proceeds to pick up right where Birdman left off involving an artist in
the entertainment industry in the throes of existential crisis including but
not limited to wild and bizarre visions, lensed exquisitely by Darius Khondji
on 65mm film. Aided by a subtle score co-written
by Bryce Dessner and Iñárritu himself which creeps in with a goofy brass sound
in between orchestral strumming, Bardo looks and sounds positively dazzling.
Intended to be a stand-in for Iñárritu right down to the
haircut, beard and attire, Bardo for all of its incessant flights of
fancy including but not limited to a recurring image of a newborn baby being
shoved back into the womb feels like a collection of abstract anecdotes involving
Mexican history, a talk show involving a nasty host, and the director’s own sense
of self, is perhaps the height of cinematic navel gazing. Flirting with the death/rebirth reality of
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life while doubling down on the antics of Birdman,
Bardo shows Iñárritu both turning further inward while reaching for the stars
in possibly the most ego driven work in the director’s oeuvre yet.
Daniel Giménez Cacho is fabulous onscreen and freely dives
into the strange and anachronistic netherworld constantly being tweaked by
subtle CGI, scenes where characters stop using their mouths to talk and one
scene where the character of Silverio turns into a child with a still adult head
attached to the body like a bobblehead. Also
strong are the film’s many costars including a brave performance from Griselda
Siciliani who is on the receiving end of a most vulgar recurring sight gag
intended to be allegorical for stillbirth.
Mostly though, Bardo follows around Cacho as he literally and figuratively
more than once throughout the film walks off into infinity. There are scenes that would make the likes of
Alain Resnais blush with hypnotic wide-angled tracking shots and marvelously
weird set pieces. And therein lies the
real problem with Bardo is its tendency to meander across the span of
its three-hour running time with some of its asides landing while others fly by
without much impact.
Proposed as Iñárritu’s 8½ with the surreal
fourth-wall-breaking nature of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! which
also drifted in and out of song and dance amid an unfettered onslaught of bewildering
asides, Bardo which is slated to hit theaters in limited release
followed by a Netflix streaming release is difficult to the point of being a
potential career ender for the esteemed writer-director. What is intended to be a swan dive into the nebulous headspace of a tortured artist quickly becomes tedious and even aggravating after a good long while.
While clearly the most technically ambitious
work to date with images of a stark open desert in Mexico that touch upon the
beauties of Ron Fricke’s 70mm documentaries Baraka and Samsara, Bardo
is a difficult, exhausting, frustrating experience that for all its bloated
length in the end doesn’t amount to much we didn’t already hear in Birdman. Worth seeing theatrically for the lush
cinematography and brilliant sound design but the director’s pants are off in
this frankly masturbatory exercise in ego driven filmmaking.
--Andrew Kotwicki
