Plot: An epic, visually stunning and immersive experience set against the intimate and moving journey of Silverio, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, who, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to his native country, unaware that this simple trip will push him to an existential limit. The folly of his memories and fears have decided to pierce through the present, filling his everyday life with a sense of bewilderment and wonder.
Review: Early in Bardo, main character, Silverio tells his driver, “If you don’t know how to play around, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.” Truer words have never been spoken, especially regarding director Alejandro G. Innaritu. The Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant has only directed seven feature films over the last two decades, and each has progressively become more ambitious and experimental. Delving into technical challenges involving natural shooting locations, long takes, and even virtual reality, Inarritu is as ambitious as he is creative. Bardo may be his most ambitious and personal film to date and one that echoes skills he has honed in his prior feature films to tell a semi-autobiographical story of a filmmaker accepting an award and facing his inner torment. It is a beautiful, weird, hilarious, sad, and bizarre movie that will be incredibly divisive for fans of the filmmaker and Netflix audiences stumbling across it starting today.
At two hours and forty minutes, Bardo is not a casual watch. Opening with a Terrence Malick-esque landscape shot, we see the shadow of a man as he runs and takes flight. It is a wonderfully shot sequence that is presented with no context. The film then shifts to a woman giving birth and the newborn telling the doctor that he wants to go back inside. The doctor then puts the baby back inside his mother’s womb, so he doesn’t have to deal with the depressing reality of the world. The jarring shifts between surreal and weird happen consistently through Bardo, sometimes consisting of waking dreams and musical sequences that transition into conventional dialogue exchanges between characters. The film jumps right into the loose story of Silverio Gama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), a documentary filmmaker who is about to accept a prestigious award in America and goes on a fever dream journey through his own life.
Silverio is an obvious avatar for Inarritu, himself a Mexican filmmaker who has garnered several American awards. There is more than a passing physical resemblance between Cacho and Inarritu, which makes this story seem even more like a lightly fictionalized biopic. Inarritu uses this story to face events from his own life, whether based on actual occurrences or as a way to exorcise some internal emotional strife. The film moves, almost fluidly, from profound moments grounded in logic to unbelievable, reality-defying ones. In one scene, Silverio meets with an American ambassador to discuss a meeting with the President, shifting to a reenactment of a battle from the Mexican-American War. Another sequence features the return of the newborn who wasn’t ready to leave the womb, this time appearing inconveniently during oral sex. It is weird and weirdly funny and par for the course when it comes to this movie.
Inarritu takes many cues from filmmakers before him in creating the visuals of this movie. Primarily, Bardo feels like a cross between Terrence Malick films like The Tree of Life and the works of French filmmaker Leos Carax. There are also hints of Stanley Kubrick in Inarritu’s use of lighting and framing in many sequences, especially the interactions between Silverio and the ghosts of his family members. It is likely a disservice to Inarritu to call out all of the directors whose work Bardo resembles because this movie really is a singular creation. If anything, I can see elements of Inarritu’s own works here, especially the extended shots that reminded me of Birdman, the natural lighting of The Revenant, and the character interactions echoing back to Amores Perros and 21 Grams.
Nothing can be taken seriously in Bardo, yet it demands to be taken as such. This film is full of contradictions, clearly an intentional decision from Inarritu and his co-writer Nicolas Giacobone. It is at once a comedy and a drama, surreal and very realistic, beautiful and disturbing, and yet overall the only appropriate way to describe it seems to be exhausting. Alejandro G. Inarritu shares credits on Bardo as director, writer, composer, editor, and producer. Had he elected to star as Silverio, Inarritu likely could have done it all. This is the most epic movie to date for the filmmaker and yet also his most intimate project. The existential crisis at the core of Bardo is something almost anyone can relate to and gives this movie a complimentary feel to Birdman, another story of a man facing his past. Both films explore similar themes, but Inarritu makes Bardo significantly more epic.
Bardo is an exhaustive and exhausting movie, one that is full of impressive technical prowess and some true artistic merit. While many are calling Alejandro G. Inarritu’s film overindulgent or pretentious, I found it to be a beautiful experiment that could have used a little tightening up. While Inarritu did trim almost thirty minutes from the festival cut of the movie, it is still about an hour too long, with many scenes feeling redundant while others linger. This is a movie that is as divisive as critics are making it seem but one that has the potential to gain some buzz as we enter awards season. The cinematography alone makes this movie worth watching, with almost any moment a pause worthy shot that you could frame and hang on your wall. While Bardo is Inarritu’s most ambitious, epic, and impressive film, it is far from his best work.