Even Alejandro G Iñárritu’s biggest fans will concede the director is inclined to self-indulgence.
The sprawling, multi-perspective narratives of Babel, the extravagant misery of Biutiful and the dozen largely unwarranted endings of Birdman are a testament to the Mexican auteur’s ambition, vision and, well, unabashed pretentiousness.
Haters need to hold on to their hats for his follow-up to the masterful, Oscar-winning The Revenant.
Clocking in at a mere two-and-a-half-hours – some 22 minutes shorter than the version that screened at Venice – Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is a film of arresting visuals, surreal rabbit holes and meandering detours. Even the tangents have tangents in Iñárritu’s throwback to Federico Fellini’s 8½.
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Daniel Giménez Cacho takes on the filmmaker’s mannerisms and reputation as Silverio, a garlanded US-based journalist and documentarian who decides to reconnect with his native Mexico.
This navel-gazing odyssey – co-scripted by the director and Birdman writer Nicolás Giacobone – brings the hero face-to-face with the ghost of his father and a former TV news colleague.
Cinematographer Darius Khondji ponders the protagonist’s relentless self-analysis through a wide lens. There are images that linger. A Los Angeles train car is flooded with water and axolotls; a comically extended umbilical cord comes to signify the newborn that Silverio and his wife lost; the conquistador Hernán Cortés sitting on a pile of corpses.
Too often, the carnivalesque visuals fail to land: a sequence that transposes Silverio’s head on to a small boy’s body and poached egg breasts is silly rather than impactful.
Between the subplot about Amazon buying up the Mexican state of Baja California, reflections on migrants, an account of the Mexican-US war, choreography set to an instrumentation-stripped version of Bowie’s Let’s Dance, hundreds of city dwellers falling down to signify cartel violence, and all the other stuff, it’s hard to stay tuned.
The big-top score, credited to the director and The National’s Bryce Dessner, adds to the muddled tone. Named for a Buddhist concept referencing the transition between birth and death, Bardo may transport the viewer to a dream space but not perhaps the one Iñárritu intended. Zzzzz.
