“Bard, false chronicle of a handful of truths” is a longer film than its title, and perhaps even more pretentious. It is the first film that Alejandro G. Iñárritu has made in his native Mexico in 22 years, and you can feel, in every scene, the sweat and ardor of his ambition. He wants to make an epic statement about life and death, fiction and reality, history and imagination. He wants to make a confessional autobiographical fantasy about the fears and dreams that hide behind his facade of a famous and famous film director. He also wants to complement and compete with fellow filmmaker and transplanted compatriot Alfonso Cuarón, who in 2018 returned to Mexico and drew on his own life to make "Roma," the world's most artistic Oscars bait movie, which was financed by deep pockets. from Netflix.
More than any of that, Iñárritu wants to create an on-screen hero who, despite their scruffy relationship, is less a conventional dramatic character than a traveling conduit, a figure who becomes a projection of everything the filmmaker wants him to be. . Iñárritu meets most of these objectives, in part because he is a fantastic technician: a cinematographic poet of dreams of changing landscapes, many of them interior. When he fills a room with sand, it's not a designer fantasy; he feels that the characters walk on the moon. So why is "Bardo," for all its skill, star-reaching aspiration, and majestic sweep, such a windy, confusing, and, okay, I'll just say it, monotonous experience? The movie is full of good things, but it's three hours long and it's mostly full of itself.
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Writers: Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone
Stars: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid
The title is a Tibetan word that refers to the Buddhist concept of a floating transitional state between death and rebirth. "Bard" opens across a vast expanse of desert with the image of the hero (or at least his shadow) jumping and floating. The rest of the film takes place in a kind of emotional and spiritual limbo: 174 minutes of questioning, contemplation, imagination, anticipation. Our hero fighter and lost in the desert of his own soul is Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a renowned Mexican journalist and documentarian, in his 60s, who has lived with his family for the last 20 of those years, in Los Angeles. . But now, on the eve of the moment when he will receive a prestigious international journalism award in Los Angeles, he and his family have returned to Mexico, where he is taking stock of…everything.
He was originally a television newscaster, but he walked away from that role when he realized he was selling a commercially packaged version of reality. He wanted to dig deeper, to speak the truths that were increasingly difficult to say aloud in a Mexico ruled by increasingly corrupt powers, whether forces within the government or lawless dictators running the drug cartels. So he became a freelance reporter and found praise in doing so. The film, however, is not a celebration of Silverio's crusade.
In the press releases for the film, Iñárritu says that Silverio "finally realizes that reality is pure fiction." The premise of "Bardo" is that Silverio abandoned a false reality to discover a deeper reality, but in doing so, he came to think of the reality he was writing about...as more real than it was. This is an acid trip idea. And now, as Silverio walks out of his life, he realizes that existence itself is a kind of mythology, something he clings to with all his life. He has reached an end point, he no longer believes in his mission. But what does he believe in? The search for that answer is the journey of the film.
Bored already? If any of this sounds familiar, you should, because "Bardo" is the latest film to imitate the form and spirit of "8 1⁄2," the 1963 art house landmark in which Federico Fellini made a Full movie about a film director. who no longer knew why he was making a movie, so he spent the whole movie wondering about it. “8 1⁄2” is one of the most famous films in the history of cinema, to the point that it has long ceased to be just a film. It's a genre now: the existential circus, built around an isolated, self-reflective big man famous creator who is caught up in a midlife crisis of identity and imagination, and as a result spends the film not so much doing things as withdrawing from the world. universe of doing things, contemplating its relationship to the world, meditating on life, love, morality, pleasure, and death like a media-age Hamlet, asking over and over again, in a hundred different ways, “ What does this all mean? ”
Watch Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths 2022 Trailer
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