An unmissable exploration of life and death
Calling Alejandro Inarritu an eclectic and idiosyncratic film-maker is about the laziest opening to a film review I can imagine. And yet here we are.
In the 20 or so years since he kicked the doors open with Amores Perros – one of my very favourite films of all-time – Inarritu has shown Hollywood his own take on their tropes with 21 Grams and Babel, broken our hearts with Biutiful and skewered the pretensions of film-making, theatre and acting while being a masterclass in all three with Birdman.
Which is surely the most interesting film to have won the Oscar for Best Picture in the past 20 years. (Discuss)
Inarritu followed Birdman with The Revenant, which had to settle for Best Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography.
And now he is back with Bardo, a film that is being marketed as a comedy – and which made me laugh out loud many times, but which is also one of the most affecting films I’ve seen in years.
In the present day, shuttling between Los Angeles and Mexico City, Silverio Gama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) is a successful and wealthy documentary-maker. I know that will make a few friends laugh bitterly but, internationally, such people do exist.
Gama has carved a career documenting Mexico, its incredible history, people and vast inequalities, even though he has lived further north for more than a decade.
Gama is being honoured in Los Angeles with an award for his journalism and film-making. Before he accepts it, he will travel home to Mexico to reconcile with old friends and – it turns out – have an existential crisis that will bring his entire life crashing down.
Although Gama is happily married to the wonderful Lucia – and they have a very likeable and well-rounded teenage son and daughter – we also glean that there was a first child, who died after only a day. And this tragedy – accepted, but always present – will propel the moments during which Gama will perhaps find his way back to his family and to the world.
Bardo is a gorgeous, swirling, unclassifiable film. It is perhaps the most personal – at least partially autobiographical – film Inarritu will ever make. But it is more than that. This is a procession of scenes and ideas. We visit Mexico’s sprawling history, but never dwell on it. We explore ideas of what creativity is – and of how we create to hide ourselves, more often than we admit. And Bardo talks, in loose, hilarious and absolutely loveable terms, about the real big stuff – love, mortality – and everything that comes after and before.
The film is a chronicle of deaths foretold and remembered. It is a tumultuous examination of the places we find ourselves when our past is being rewritten by the unreliable author of our memory.
Bardo reminds us that we only exist to other people as an act of their imagination and interpretation – and that our authenticity is all we have.
Everything is a dream, Inarritu seems to say, and we are all going to die anyway. So you may as well fall in love, do something useful. And above all, try not to be a jerk.
I’m too young to have seen a Federico Fellini film in a cinema. And my brain is too ramshackle to ever properly appreciate a great film on a TV-sized screen. Watching Bardo on Thursday night, I wondered if this is what Fellini must have looked like to a lucky cinema audience, 50 or 60 years ago.
On a real screen, with Darius Khondji’s cinematography glowing and Bryce Dessner’s music pouring out of a proper sound system, Bardo is an unrepeatable trip. I’m so glad I saw it.
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (R16, 160 mins) Directed by Alejandro Inarritu Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★★
Now screening in select cinemas, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths will debut on Netflix on December 16.