Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2022)

[therewillbeblus]

Or, “I don’t like it because AGI is pretentious.”

I like Ehrlich’s writeup -as a critic who has been able to take the perspective and personally fallen on both sides of AGI debate, similar to myself- as he talked about how the self-reflexivity of his awareness of his pretentious charges aren’t as profound or working in the direction he might think, but still a step in the right direction. I’m looking forward to it with measured expectations per usual with AGI. Only recently did I discover 21 Grams is actually excellent rather than the vacuous melodrama I diagnosed it as upon release, so we’re getting warmer

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

On paper this sounds interesting. Is it me or does it sound a bit like Reygadas' likewise much lamented very personal film, Our Time? I quite admired that one a lot for its simultaneous scope and intimacy. Revenant and Birdman rank among the worst films I've ever seen, and the critics were drooling over them, so, I guess I'll have to check this one out. I agree TWB that 21 Grams indeed holds up quite strongly, 20 years later. I think it's a better post-Memento exercise than Amores perros was.

[DarkImbecile]

Amores perros premiered at Cannes four months ahead of Memento in Venice the same year

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

Amores perros premiered at Cannes four months ahead of Memento in Venice the same year

Got me! I guess Amores perros would be more post-Short Cuts'ish, plots/fates intertwine, like in Magnolia, where I would still definitely call 21 Grams a post-Memento film that's better than anything that Nolan ever did.

[therewillbeblus]

I feel like 21 Grams is going for something so completely different than Memento, let alone Nolan's interests as a filmmaker in general, so I fail to see any connective tissue between them, other than a manipulation of temporal narrative constructs and using different visuals means to convey the time period being shot. But it's not like nonchronological narrative began with Memento- I'm sure there's a masterlist somewhere, but just off the top of my head something like Two For the Road feels closer to the scattered and arrhythmic narrative structure of 21 Grams than Memento's far more straightforward design, and that was a popular film made roughly a third of a century earlier.

[domino harvey]

At the time of its release they were commonly grouped together as being films that were at the forefront of a trend of chopping up conventional narrative order in their storytelling. These groupings may be far less valuable now that the trick is old hat (and as you point out, like most things shiny and bright, it wasn’t even new then)

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

At the time of its release they were commonly grouped together as being films that were at the forefront of a trend of chopping up conventional narrative order in their storytelling. These groupings may be far less valuable now that the trick is old hat (and as you point out, like most things shiny and bright, it wasn’t even new then)

Yes, that's the way remember it. The grouping, even though it might not make a lot of sense now, they were seen as trailblazers in the main stream of films. They certainly started a trend in screenwriting. I haven't watched Memento for many years. It's kind of like a film that only works once, isn't it? The way Nolan approach it, and many of his other films, like a kind of game of scriptwriting felt fresh then, but also kind of gimmicky and not something I felt like returning to when I'd watched it. 21 Grams feels less like a game, a film where the chopping up of the narrative actually had an emotional impact plot-wise. But then came Babel which I had luckily forgotten. Also one of the worst and most pretentious films of all times. Still, I'll give this new one a shot.

[Persona]

Memento still works for me on rewatches because beyond the gimmick there is a sort of subdued emotional depth to being put into this framework with Guy Pearce's character and experiencing it with him and I just really love the performances and the very dry and sometimes dark humor aspects. The rumination on memory was on-the-nose at the end but still lands.

21 Grams never really worked for me.

[Mr Sausage]

Memento still works for me on rewatches because beyond the gimmick there is a sort of subdued emotional depth to being put into this framework with Guy Pearce's character and experiencing it with him and I just really love the performances and the very dry and sometimes dark humor aspects. The rumination on memory was on-the-nose at the end but still lands.

21 Grams never really worked for me.

It depresses me, when I hear people bagging on Memento, how often their complaints and fault-finding seem not so much about the movie in itself as the idea of the movie: the cultural phenomenon, the kind of fans it attracts, the kind of trends and imitators it inspired, just the idea of it as some hip, flashy new early aughts thing. The criticisms so often confuse all that for the actual work. Memento is a great first watch, but gets better on subsequent watches, when you no longer have to expend your energy following the story and can really take in how sad and mournful the film is. There is a beautiful scene, the heart of the film and the best argument against the tired complaint of gimmickry, where Leonard sits at a fire, burning the mementos of his wife, and his voice over gives a quiet and heartbreaking monologue on the impossibility, the sheer physical inability, for him to ever properly grieve. And as the story winds backwards, we watch as all his relationships deteriorate, in true noir fashion, so that no matter how much better they may have become chronologically, Leonard's perpetual lack of context will rob him of any true connection with the people in his life, just as his lack of context prevents him from any proper understanding of himself. Leonard is eternally caught in a past he cannot remember, something the film shows brilliantly on a technical level, but does not skimp on when it comes to the emotional level. The film deserves better enemies.

[therewillbeblus]

Very well said, and the final choice he makes is one of the saddest examples of self-determination meeting fatalism. I loved the film in theatres and still love it today. To stay roughly on topic, one could argue the charges against Memento resemble the bulk of the title of AGI’s new film

[DarkImbecile]

I’ve never actively disliked an Iñárritu film (though it’s been so long since I saw 21 Grams and Babel that I can’t definitively say how I feel about those now), and I went into this excited to see something that seemed to be aggravating all of his usual haters so I could dismiss them yet again. Unfortunately — while it’s not without its ecstatic moments, and the last 30 minutes add a lot of value — I have to agree with the emerging consensus that Bardo is a major misfire.

This film is a recursive cacophony of ideas — visual and auditory, personal and political, comedic and dramatic — and when those ideas work, the film is just as exciting, surprising, and/or moving as I could have hoped. The problem is that those successful sequences make up maybe 40 minutes of a three-hour runtime, and the remainder ranges from disappointing and overextended to painfully cringeworthy.

The positives include several inventive, poignant, or just outright joyful visual sequences, and the core cast, particularly Daniel Giménez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani. The negatives include the almost unbelievably unfunny attempts at comedy (I laughed exactly once) and the derivative gestures at Fellini and Cuarón’s Roma, among others — as well as a mid-film attempt to pre-emptively acknowledge those derivative moments that fails to convincingly excuse them.

Perhaps the best summation of my experience: I love long, difficult movies (and I almost never check my watch during a film) but after the third long sequence in a row that fell totally flat for me, I thought I’d see how close we were to the end, since it had to be well past the halfway point — and was shocked and horrified to realize not even a full hour had passed. Brief disclaimer: I had been awake for 21 straight hours by the time the film ended, so there’s a chance I’m being less charitable than I would be in better condition… but given the general befuddled scowls this seems to have been met with here and in Venice, I doubt it’s just me.

[Finch]

Add Walter Chaw's review to the growing list of pans.

Despite back-to-back Academy Awards for Directing, Iñárritu is still All That Jazz-ing his (literal this time) crucifixion at the hands of "enemies," i.e., critics, who have him formulated to the wall. A solid hour of this interminable slog, this unwanted but tone-perfect adaptation of Warren Zevon's "Splendid Isolation," is Silverio walking around meaningfully as DP Darius Khondji gives glory and weight to shadow and clumsy suggestion. On the subtlety scale, Bardo, like Birdman before it, would rank "Full Shrek." Oh, you got that reference, good for you--you've seen Fellini and Gilliam, now here's the beach scene from The Tree of Life, and the adolescent dreamscapes of Emir Kusturica, and the anachronistic historical reenactments of Alexander Sokurov, and the giant statuary hand from Theo Angelopoulos's Landscape in the Mist, and the intimate beachfront annihilations and mundane infantilizations of Kaufman/Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the umbilici of Takeshi Kitano's Dolls, and the psychedelic sexuality of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain. The only prize for ticking these references off the checklist is that people think you're boring as fuck, and they're right. Maybe Iñárritu knows the most tedious thing on God's green earth is an artist who thinks his life is novel and so he seeks to camouflage his quotidian disappointments with the work of real artists who've managed to tease universal truths out of their fear and loathing. Maybe he knows being thought of in the same company as those giants and their masterpieces wouldn't happen naturally, whatever his popular acclaim, because he's yet to make a single film as good and pure as his first, Amores Perros. For all the crosses in Bardo, that's probably the heaviest one for him to carry.

[A Tempted Christ]

Interesting.

[diamonds]

Fellini was a genius but he did not invent imagination in film. There’s culture outside the Anglo culture.

[Mr Sausage]

I get Inarritu wanting to link his movie to Latin American Boom (and pre-Boom) literature, but using phantasmagoria to psychoanalyze the dreams and anxieties of an artist and their relationship to family and culture is not very Latin American Boom, tho' it is very Fellini (that notorious Anglo). Also, I did have to chuckle that he chose to defend his three-hour monster by comparing it to Juan Rulfo and Jorge Luis Borges, two writers well known for keeping things very short.

[DarkImbecile]

Iñárritu has crafted a new cut that’s 22 minutes shorter and adds a new scene:

Iñarritu has been wrestling with his vision a lot in recent weeks. In addition to working on the trailer, the filmmaker reopened the edit on his movie after watching it with audiences in Venice and Telluride, shrinking and rearranging certain scenes while adding a new one in.

The latest cut, which screens for the first time at the San Sebastián Film Festival this week, runs a full 22 minutes shorter, bringing the total running time to two hours and 32 minutes without credits.

Iñarritu said that since deadlines prevented him from holding friends and family screenings before his initial festival run, it was only during that period that he was able to process the movie with an audience. “The first time I saw my film was with 2,000 people in Venice,” he said. “That was a nice opportunity to see it and learn about things that could benefit from being tied up a bit, add one scene that never arrived on time, and move the order of one or two things. Little by little, I tightened it, and I am very excited about it.” That process was still ongoing. “Honestly, I will keep doing this until it’s released to get the best film while I can,” he said. “You never finish a film. The deadlines just ask you to deliver it.”

This is nothing new for the director, who said he tinkered with the edits of “21 Grams” and “Babel” after their respective festival premieres. “If I could, I would keep editing the whole year,” he said. “I would love to keep working with this film all my life.”

At Telluride, Iñarritu said he was avoiding early reviews of “Bardo,” which were mixed. This week, he confirmed that nothing has changed on that front. “I want to reaffirm that I have not read one single review for my healthy mental state,” he said. “There is nobody better than me who knows all the dots that connect and how they could connect better.”

There’s also a trailer

[Black Hat]

I'm mostly positive on this because of Daniel Gimenez Cacho. The problem with the movie is it's not going over new ground. It's the same old existential that's been done better elsewhere. If anything, this disinterest in being precocious makes the film feel way too clunky.

[therewillbeblus]

I absolutely loved this messy regurgitation of unprotected emotions. Bardo is Iñárritu at his most honest, viscerally exploring his narcissistic impulses for compulsively searching for a sense of control with both self-compassion and evisceration. In exploiting his emotionally-autobiographical attempts to hold onto moments of concepts and revelations in response to an expansive world and individualized life of relentlessly ungovernable change, Iñárritu grapples with his impotence to achieve catharsis through any conceivable interventions for (self-)discovery. Perhaps I get something very different out of Iñárritu's output than others, but it was a relief to witness him take inspiration from Fellini for this exercise (notably 8 ½ and Juliet of the Spirits, but it could really be any post-La Dolce Vita film, to prompt a similar crisis-pivot action in a successful filmmaker’s career). Over the years, I’ve come around to appreciating Fellini's turning point for (yes)humbly keeping its focus on an aesthetically transparent level. I’ve never interpreted Iñárritu to be particularly convincing when he aims for more cavernous investigations, guided by influences who do venture to different depths than his particular skills, or rather his instinctual approach, allow him to traverse.

That’s not a flaw of the auteur, just like I don’t think Fellini is a lesser filmmaker for taking the idiosyncratically faux-superficial routes he does to engage with raw and real content of his soul. I just think Iñárritu occasionally chooses ones misaligned with his natural mindset and personality, without the willingness to go as deep as he needs to to get the desired outcome. Birdman is a great example, and feels like the direct predecessor to this one, where Iñárritu infused all his heart and intelligence into a product in a manner that showed the limitations of his strong intellectual tools to access that 'heart'. I think that film succeeded in part because he occasionally admitted this in the margins of the material, but there was still a mark of agitation staining the picture, Iñárritu aggressively attempting to fuse his talents for excess, and cleverness in applying visual wit, with a portrait of his struggle to accept his impediments. This is that film.

Bardo is a perfect confessional for Iñárritu, a signal of acknowledgement that he’s achieved a sense of self-actualization about his faults and strengths, and most importantly, who he is as an artist. He self-reflexively feeds into his influences and his own life with the same kind of enigmatic shallowness they each offer, cheekily manipulating the medium’s possibilities as he often does (including, ironically -as in 21 Grams with film stock, or The Revenant with untraversed location shooting and natural light- to achieve the most “organic” ‘look’ possible) to consciously mingle jokes about his own process, solipsistic and delusional logic, and yet earnest desire to capture the truth he feels violently rebelling inside and yet cannot actualize in a form that matches the pulsating chaos. Here is a film that is that chaos, all externalized, none of it kept at the baseline-frustrating (to both us and Iñárritu) containment of our gated introversion. That doesn’t mean it’s as coherent or fluid or digestible as his other films or what they’re trying to be, but it’s a proper refraction of a lifelong daydream, liberated from decades of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole by recognizing the shape of the peg and detonating that restrictive hole.

Just like Fellini, it’s not lost on Iñárritu that in critiquing his psychological, philosophical, and sociocultural hypocrisies via the form of an epic fantasy drama, he’s simultaneously creating his most extravagant product of grandiosity yet. But not only is it the most, or perhaps only authentic place he has left to go- to hide or profess or sulk or shout- but it’s precisely because he understands this, and demonstrates his keen awareness in cultivated action across the span of this poetic epic, that allows Bardo to transcend its charges of shallowness. Iñárritu is saying, ‘Yes, and -’ with this film being the coda to that shallow response, to accusations of a shallow career, to self-constructed condemnations questioning a potentially vapid life, with a phantasmagoric eruption of existential layers as grand and lavish as the film’s and Iñárritu (and our) lives’ low-hanging fruit of cheap criticisms are. Yes, everyone is thinking about or dreaming about him, but so is he and that’s lonely, and they aren’t really, or even real, and he knows it. And feeling sorry for yourself isn’t much of a help either, but if you recognize a need, what’s more honest than putting that in the soup too? Nothing about this is didactic, it’s an anti-answer film made by a man obsessed with finding the nonexistent answers to alleviate the mess he gives us here, and seen in that light, it’s just as humble as it is megalomaniacal. One of the film’s highlights is a midway confrontation with his old friend, which unveils both an admission of the faults in being a sociopolitical dodger and a condescending soliloquy of the sanctimonious aggression of those who do pick a side, itself a sanctimonious response. One could be reductive and describe Iñárritu's film is a one big labyrinthine punchline of the inescapability of calling out behavior or expressing feelings without suffering the paradoxical obstacle of that boomeranging back and puncturing his ego, but that is perhaps as close as you can get to summarizing something so vast, abstract, and yet sensitively defined.

Nothing is more truthful than exposing one’s own hypocrisy, or as the title suggests, a surrender to the compromise one inherently makes as they approach their own life- and if you don’t want to praise that, what would be more open or revealing? Is it even possible for some audiences to come away from a film this achingly transparent without denouncing its fundamental fuel: Self-obsessed yearning to be seen, to ascend the insatiable desire of an immature part of ours begging for reprieve from its perceived infinite disrepair? A courageous descent into the rabbit hole of self to wrestle with his impotence to meet competing needs of embracing humility and feeding his ego? There are few scenes as powerful as the one where Iñárritu confronts his father with non-directional pathos about the fatalistic neglect we feel from the compounded experience of loss and self-doubt, captured with the most heightened scenic surreality and therapeutic reality simultaneously. Or take a conversation on a plane with his son, where Iñárritu's pleas to share in his family’s inner turmoil is conceited in its aims of insecure self-importance and genuine in the drive to penetrate unplumbed intimacy. Regardless of whether the impetus is for selfish reasons to not feel alone or empathic ones to altruistically support those he loves, the behavior is one of impassioned validity. And the instinct to obsess about a rigid Absolute Truth here is Iñárritu's Achilles-Heel preoccupation, and it would be a lie to omit that exhausting cognitive debate, because it so clearly serves as a distraction to protect and a gateway to unlock his emotional tissue.

I would argue that what some might dismiss as an easy cop-out is actually incredibly hard to do (to bring oneself to do it, and to do it artfully well), especially when defaulting to some kind of tangible pole is in our DNA as narrative craftsmen, for the medium and in making sense of -and selling the value of- our own lives. No, this is working in friction with being, especially Iñárritu's as he self-admittedly states that he’s tired of working with ideas and wants to express his emotional parts. No wonder I think this is his best, boldest, most complete ‘full-measure’ film. I love that I now have an appropriately half-inflated ethos of why Iñárritu prefers the tangibility of ideas to the impermanence of people, relationships, and subtext. They’re accessible to him. That’s just so fucking human.

I imagine that Iñárritu's most vocal defenders will enjoy this- especially since it’s basically amplifying Birdman’s style and destroying its buffer to the same substance, but, consequently, I find it curious that his detractors don’t love this for the very rhetorical yet earnest question it posits: Am I lacking substance? By itself, the vulnerability dripping through that question, and how the filmmakers asks it, is more stereotypical 'substance' than most Iñárritu films offer, and I like him!

By the time we get to the crucifying eulogy, I realized that the best point of comparison may actually be Abel Ferrara’s similarly self-aggrandizing and critiquing Tommaso, or even Desplechin's recent Tromperie. This may be well-trodden territory, but where else is an artist supposed to go? Isn’t it the universality of this kind of existential crisis that makes the audience relate and celebrate the emotional depths in art, and don’t we also applaud a normal person in our lives for going to these places rather than burying them and stunting opportunities for growth? Why can’t these two go together for an artist engaging in the same kind of process on a more communicable platform, and why does that make us uncomfortable? Maybe I'm missing something, but the issues I’ve heard pose against this film read like viewer-constructed obstacles rather than fair lobs against Iñárritu and this portrait of where he’s at; an intentionally-synthesized, excoriated and polished examination of the soul.

[DarkImbecile]

I imagine that Iñárritu's most vocal defenders will enjoy this

Incorrect

[therewillbeblus]

I imagine that Iñárritu's most vocal defenders will enjoy this

Incorrect

Okay, fine, but why is that the case? What do people get out of his films that this one is lacking in comparison? Do admirers of his craft prefer the style of inhibited emotions and disinhibited commitment to style, and how come that craft cannot be elastically-applied to something that's intentionally and deterministically less focused? Is this kind of product, that's structurally a kind of messy confession, from a man admitting that he's trying to grapple with his deepest emotions rather than ideas for the first time, possible to appeal to an audience at all, and if so in what form? I feel like I took the time to draft a post with plenty of open questions for exploration on a discussion forum, and expected either no engagement or something more than a post telling me I'm wrong

It's interesting to read through your original writeup, because due to a variety of interruptions, I was unable to watch this film in one sitting and instead, begrudgingly, consumed its contents in a few sessions across a 24 hour period. I kept kicking myself for not catching this in a theatre, because its grand scope and surreal dreamscape feel best ingested in one overwhelming swoop without distractions, but I'm now wondering if breaking this up into episodes with time to reflect on it in between allowed me to appreciate it more. Perhaps this is answering one of my own questions by rhetorically positing a new one: Would these kinds of naturally-fragmented and uneven regurgitations of emotion from directors in crisis be best served in miniseries form, each episode containing a bite-sized blip of acute psych-art? Would that help audiences digest it better, and why would that be - because it would be less overwhelming, frustrating, or boring as a consumer of the medium in and of itself, or because we'd have a higher tolerance for being repulsed at handling another's hubris if there was less in one meal?

[DarkImbecile]

Honestly, I was mostly teasing you, but it’s difficult and probably unfair for me to respond in detail because we saw substantially different versions of the film — in addition to, as you point out, seeing those versions under very different conditions.

But in general, I think that where usually Iñárritu’s films are at the very least each tonally and stylistically consistent (some would say to a punishing fault), Bardo is so schizophrenic from scene to scene that a sequence I did enjoy would be preceded and followed by something much less successful. And for me, it’s very much a question of unsuccessful style and flawed execution and not of the value of his themes or messages; the questions he’s posing are, I would argue, secondary to the way he’s posing them by his own design.

[therewillbeblus]

Hmmm, I felt that deflating the momentum was often an intentional design and reflexively engaging with the themes. A scene of spectacle on the verge of reaching some kind of catharsis -or at least a place of stasis where Iñárritu could rest on the potency of his reflections- would be pulled out from under him and forcibly pivot onto something he was unprepared to face, robbing him of stimulation or serenity or just a lucid clasp on his pathos in the process. It seemed to be a film deliberately obfuscating opportunities for him to revert to defensive complacency, and I admired that. A consistency of craft akin to his typical fare would've defeated the purpose of this exercise of enlightenment, and shed dimensions of desperation and insecurity that are as significantly tethered into the fringes of the form as they are disseminated in the distinct content, protecting this from becoming a mere vanity project. But point taken that this isn't going to be as popularly seductive as his more controlled pieces, and is esoteric to a degree that makes most of these loose, meandering, therapeutic performances look like popcorn movies.

[barryconvex]

I thought this was pretty great although I can't really expand on why as I've just finished watching and digestion of this behemoth will take me quite awhile, years even. But in a nutshell this opus of "what it means" to be a creative, middle aged father and most of all, a Mexican rang true from its first frame. Not everything works but i can't not love a movie that depicts a newborn requesting to be put back in the womb. This is what The Tree Of Life (the film that sprang to mind most frequently while watching, along with Y Tu Mama Tambien- another epic that depicts the current state of the director's beloved homeland) looks like in the hands of a less somber, non American director.

[knives]

If Reygadas has proven himself something of a filmic Juan Rulfo then AGI continues to cement himself as the new Carlos Fuentes who is more omnipresent on the picture than the figure I assume most film fans will connect this surreal biographical sketch with. The opening act is definitely the powerhouse, but as we go into domesticity the film never stops at being this uniquely Mexican expression of inner turmoil. In fact, I have to imagine both for fans and those who dislike the film one’s proximity to Mexico will effect their perception of the film.