Hal Kitchen
The big trend with a lot of the recent prestige pictures released in the last couple of years is auteur directors making introspective and semi-autobiographical dramas about their own lives, identities, and experiences. These have varied wildly in quality, but their existence should be no surprise given the recent pandemic. Artists of all walks have been left to look inwards and with many of the most celebrated auteurs reaching their peaks of influence at around the time they’re going to be having their midlife crises, nostalgia and self-examination are potent drugs they can be prone to overindulgence. Overindulgence is a word that’s haunted Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu since the premiere of the original more-than-three-hour version of Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths at Venice last year. The version that reaches our screens courtesy of Netflix is an only marginally more restrained two hours and forty nine minutes, and it takes very little cynicism to see how that word could still apply. Shocking as it may be to learn, believe it or not Bardo is actually a bit pretentious.
Pretension is often regarded as a reductive criticism so it would be prudent to explain precisely what I mean by it in this context. Bardo is a surrealist character study following Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) a respected documentarian haunted by a sense of his own failure and hypocrisy, personally, professionally, and politically. Much of his insecurity stems from his growing complacency and cowardice. His work is celebrated for its bravery and iconoclasm while he lives in luxury in California with his family and visits his home nation of Mexico only infrequently. He and his wife are still struggling with the stillbirth of their first child, though they have two more who are now healthy adults whom Silverio’s pedagogic murmuring keeps at arm’s length.
There’s enough drama here for a conventional, realist story to tell but surrealism can be a powerful tool to poetically expand upon these ideas. Sadly though, Iñárritu’s grasp of surrealism has never been all that strong. His attempts to grasp at the sublime rarely need his self-parodic undercutting to come across as ridiculous. If you can take absurd CGI babies being reinserted into their mother’s wombs and Giménez Cacho’s head superimposed onto a child’s body seriously, then good luck to you, but it was just too silly for me.
Their ridiculousness extends too far beyond their meaning with little synergy between the two. Rather than surreal, it’s merely uncanny, often either too witlessly literal or too artlessly obscure. Of course Iñárritu knows it’s silly, he points it out, continually undercutting his own attempts at pathos and provocation even when he achieves them. The most successful moments in Bardo are its most straightforwardly satirical and least self-reflexive. Often Iñárritu will create a compelling moment and then undercut it as the protagonist second guesses his own imagination. Bardo relentlessly see-saws between brutal and droll cynicism and whimsical poetry, neither of which is invested with enough imagination or feeling to strike home. It seems to lack confidence in its own ability to tell a compelling story from beginning to end, and I for one came to share that skepticism.
Surrealism as a movement was borne out of short form media for a reason, because hour after hour of obscurity and irony becomes wearying without a pure emotional or logical connection to tie these moments together. Iñárritu understands this, ultimately presenting the viewer with a logical interpretation for what they’re experiencing, and the film takes on a layer of poignancy that had been eluding it. Structurally it makes sense to hold back on this revelation, but the film that precedes it suffers greatly as a result. By the time you can make any sense out of the dreamlike experience Bardo throws you into, you’ve long lost interest in it. Giving a literal interpretation to all this in itself feels like a sell-out moment that an artist with a deeper commitment to surrealism wouldn’t have surrendered to.
Like nearly all artistic explorations of the artist’s hypocrisy, my abiding response to Bardo‘s angst is a resounding “So…?” So…you’re afraid you’ve run out of ideas…that the ones you have are no good…that you’ve become complacent and comfortable and become irrelevant…that no one is listening to you and when they do you feel like a fraud for not having any answers…that you’re wasting your life turning these questions over in your head and that nothing you have to say could ever be as important as what’s happening out there in the real world?
All you’re left with is the endless restatement of the same core doubts and principles with nothing at the end to show for it. I couldn’t be so cruel as to doubt the sincerity of Bardo, but it does little but prove the truth of these self doubts, that Iñárritu does have only the most mundane ideas, hasn’t the scope or will to deal with social issues and only his own vain insecurities, and even those not terribly effectively.
