Bardo: False Chronicle Of A Handful of Truths

When Woody Allen at the peak of his career had a crack at auteurism by renovating Frederico Fellini’s autobiographical 8½ (1963) with Stardust Memories (1980) the film was almost universally decried as self-indulgent. Entering similar terrain with his story of a Mexican-born journalist and film-maker about to receive a prestigious American award for his work, Alejandro González Iñárritu is somewhat better-credentialed than Allen was at the time. This has made the American critics a little more cautious in dismissing the film but nevertheless the “self-indulgent” epithet has been widely bandied about.

Given the film’s sub-title “False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” you could say that his aim with it, to portray the fragmentary nature of consciousness, something which he later describes as “a tumult of images, memories, stories all knitted together” is a success. The trouble is that whilst the resulting film is truly what elsewhere he calls “a chronicle of uncertainties” it is disjointed and,frankly, asking too much of the audience.

The film opens with the shadow of a man trying to fly over a desert, a scene-setting device that recalls his masterpiece, 2014's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.  From there we are introduced to Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) the journalist who has returned to Mexico City prior to receiving the American award. As he muses on his life and identity as a Mexican (just in case you didn’t know Iñárritu is a Mexican who has received many prestigious awards), as he hooks up with old cronies, hallucinates the presence of his dead child and father and a famous battle scene from the Mexican-American war of 1845-6 and so on and so forth. All this is presented in a richly inventive magical realist manner with often glorious images thanks to Darius Khondji’s cinematography.

You don’t need to know anything of Mexico to pick up on the various political and historical allusions but nevertheless Iñárritu filters everything we see through the alembic of Silverio’s own awareness and interests and there is too little for us to engage with. Even just generously pruning the run-time would have helped (worryingly, Iñárritu is credited as primary editor).

As a film Bardo is a cut-above and well in line with Iñárritu's work to date but how many will find satisfaction with it is indeed a question.  

FYI: “Bardo” refers to the Buddhist concept of an intermediate, transitional state between death and rebirth.

 

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