Film premieres: Bardo, false chronicle of a few truths is a superficial return to the origin for González Iñárritu

Bardo, false chronicle of a few truths (Mexico/2022). Address: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Script: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone. Direction of photography: Darius Khonji. Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sanchez Solano. Duration: 159 minutes. Distributor: Macro Cinema. Qualification: Suitable for over 16 years. Our opinion: regular

“From success you have to take a little sip, make a crop and spit it out, if not, it poisons you”, says one of the characters in Bardo, false chronicle of a few truths, to its protagonist, a sort of alter ego – with emphasis on the ego part -, by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director who, in his eagerness to embody the imperfect prodigal son back home, made one of his most dishonest films , incoherent and Manichean. His intimate reflection on the international event and the disconcerting sensation of not being from here or from there also includes an attempt to summarize the spirit of his country from the conquest to the present day, a titanic task that Iñárritu rehearses in a two-hour film forty minutes produced by Netflix -will be available on the platform from December 16-, in which dream sequences and their old trick of fractured narrative chronology they demonstrate the limitations of an author too enamored with his own ideas.

Twenty two years after loves dogshis last Mexican film and the one that opened the doors of the world to him and got him the attention of Hollywood – he has four Oscars – the director of the reborn He decided to return to the origin knowing that that origin was already alien to him. For that, together with the Argentine screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone-winner of the Academy Award together with Armando Bo for his work in Birdman-, Iñárritu created an avatar for himself in the journalist turned star documentary filmmaker Silverio Gacho (Daniel Giménez Cacho).

The argumentative excuse to stack platitude truths about the “post-truth” era and superficial reflections on immigration is the recognition that Silverio is about to receive from an international journalism association, which generates a stir in Mexico and its relatives. Between the celebrations and the clashes with the people he left behind far away and a long time ago when he decided to emigrate with his wife Lucía (Griselda Siciliani) and their young children to the United States, the character also carries the always latent mourning in his suitcase. for a baby of the couple who died a few hours after birth.

The daydream of childbirth in which the baby decides that he is not ready to go out into the world and returns to his mother’s womb sets the tone, at the beginning of the film, that there will be no claim to realism or half measures in this story. Of course, as the plot progresses -or rather stumbles- through different vignettes about Silverio’s life, the fantastic sequences -prodigiously photographed, like the rest of the film, by Darius Khondji- are revealed as one of the traps that uses Iñárritu to shake the viewer. The history of the war between Mexico and the United States, the annihilation of the native peoples at the time of the conquest, the suffering of immigrants today and even drug trafficking appear as scenes taken from the supposedly brilliant documentaries of the protagonist.

“Anyone who doesn’t know how to play can’t be taken seriously,” says Silverio in response to the many criticisms he received in his career for those recreations. Time and time again, Iñárritu takes advantage of these dialogues to try to shield his film from the objections that he imagines will be written about Bard, which was lukewarmly received at the most recent Venice festival. This strategy of anticipating what will be said about the film does not deny the criticism. On the contrary, what he achieves is to show that beneath his gestures as a prophet of a world in crisis and his quest to review his own history, Iñárritu constantly betrays himself.

Silverio’s contradictions, like those of any immigrant returning to his country, result in a character who claims to yearn for what he actively despises and his legendary journalistic ethics proves to be pure smoke when scenes from his documentaries are glimpsed in which, for example, He is seen circulating through the streets of Mexico City or climbing a kind of pyramid made with the bodies of Mexicans massacred by Hernán Cortés, who waits for him at the top to share a cigarette with him and talk about his hypocrisy. The logic of that sequence ends up breaking down when he reveals himself as behind the scenes of a filming. Pure dramatic shell with no more value than to demonstrate the director’s apparently infinite imagination. On the way to dive inside him, Iñárritu perhaps found that capricious, fearful and somewhat lost man / boy to whom his father advises, too late, the danger of believing his own success.

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Film premieres: Bardo, false chronicle of a few truths is a superficial return to the origin for González Iñárritu