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Alejandro González Iñárritu likes to say that he made Bardo with his eyes closed.
“Basically, all the other films I have made with my eyes open, and whatever it made me feel, I was relating to a reality that I saw on the outside,” he told THR in interview with Patrick Brzeski. “With this film, the process was, I had the need to close my eyes. When you close your eyes, obviously, then you look inward — and that’s a much more complex territory.”
Bardo has been described as many things but subtle
and shy are not two of them. This is a “epic, phantasmagoric comedy drama,”
says THR again, a personal odyssey through the mind and memory of the Mexican
auteur and by extension Mexican history.
Even the full title Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful
of Truths strains for the magical realism of fact blurred with fiction
and the genre that grew out of Latin America.
Produced by Netflix, co-written by Iñárritu and Nicolás
Giacobone, the film chronicles a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary
filmmaker (played by Daniel Giménez Cacho) who returns home and grapples with
his identity, familial relationships, the folly of his memories as well as the
past of his country. He seeks answers in his past to reconcile who he is in the
present.
Iñárritu told
the audience at the London Film Festival that he saw the film as an
opportunity to challenge established cinematic conventions that he has grown
tired of seeing.
“The essence of
cinema is language, and nobody talks about that anymore. It’s all about the box
office. But I like to explore the possibilities of language. And I think this
film serves the purpose to liberate from certain conventions that I’m a little
bit tired of or not interested in anymore.”
The director had previously played with cinema language,
including lengthy one-take camera moves and overlapping storylines in films
including Amores Perros, Babel, Birdman and The Revenant. The latter
two landing him back-to-back best director Oscars.
“I was a little tired of the multi-structure,” he said in
London, as
reported by Variety. “I wanted to see how it felt to make a film about one
person. I didn’t know if I’d be able to do it. It was scary to sustain one line
of narrative.”
In this endeavor Iñárritu is widely noted to be in debt of
his cinematographer Darius Khondji who shot in wide-screen 65mm “through lenses
that seem to warp the edges of the frame, is full of arresting” and
“hallucinatory sequences that linger in the mind” reviews
The New York Times.
The director wants us to “surrender to the flow of the film”
he tells THR, likening his own movie to that of Spanish-Mexican master Luis
Buñuel. “It’s a cinematic experience to immerse yourself in. Cinema is a dream
being directed, as Buñuel said. If you ask this film for the same structure of
the TV series you have been binging, you will be fighting with it. Just go and
get lost and forget about the world and yourself for a couple hours.”
Problem is that most critics complain about the
self-indulgence of the whole project – and that we audiences are asked to
indulge Iñárritu for nearly three hours of their own life.
Perhaps stung by these criticisms, the director has shaved
22 minutes from the film after it was greeted by mixed reviews at its Venice
premiere (later mirrored at Telluride). It was the first time Iñárritu had seen
it with more than a few people.
“Pain is temporary, but the film is forever,” Iñárritu
said. “I knew I was dealing with a situation, not a problem.”
Some scenes were cut entirely, others trimmed or replaced to
achieve an overall tightening. “I
realized that it was an opportunity for me to get into some scenes a little
later, and to get out of others a little earlier — to introduce a little more
muscle and internal rhythm,” he informed THR. “Honestly, the people who saw the
original film probably will not even notice the changes. The film is intact,
essentially, it just lost a little weight. It’s the same person, just a little
bit thinner. I’m very happy about that.”
Stream of consciousness may have been the intent but putting
that on-screen necessitated precise planning.
“The complexity of this film has been the most challenging
filmmaking I have ever done in my life,” he told THR. “Because every single
frame, and every single movement was completely pre-visualized and rehearsed.
It was incredibly complex, but it was done with complete control. You become
like a doctor who is doing open-heart surgery. You cannot get emotional, you
just need to be incredibly effective and pragmatic. The patient can die if you
get emotional.”
Among the dichotomies that Bardo examines is his own sense
of identity a Mexican who left the country to find success and acclaim over the
border in the United States.
“If you stay away from your country for a long time, your
state of mind dissolves and changes. That’s what the research for this movie
was about,” he said.
“When you go back to that country, as I did for this movie, it’s like standing
in front of a mirror or meeting an old friend. It was like reinterpreting a
dream or a memory.”
He takes aim at the insularity of American culture telling Brzeski,
“It can be very hard for many Americans to get outside their bubble, because
it’s a very self-serving culture.
“You can go anywhere in the world and expect everyone to
speak your own language,” he continues, “So, it’s sometimes very difficult for
American people to grasp the emotion that we are talking about here. But that’s
what I have attempted to do with this film. Even if some people cannot relate
to it, I think there are millions of immigrants around the world who know this
feeling. It doesn’t matter if you are Mexican or American, or privileged or
not. When you lose your roots, this is what it feels like.”
As A.O Scott notes
in his NYT review , Bardo is a movie that pre-empts criticism and
strikes back. In the film, at a party,
Silverio meets up with Luis, a one-time rival who has become a star of Mexican
tabloid television. Luis takes Silverio to task for self-indulgence and
pretension, accusing him of playing the “artiste” for the Americans and
forgetting where he came from.
Silverio responds with a tirade about the venality and
hypocrisy of a media that sacrifices integrity and decency on the altar of
ratings and social media likes.
“Iñárritu isn’t always the clearest or most cogent thinker,”
Scott signs off, “but the power of his images often renders such objections
moot.”
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