Iárritu went inside in “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” nearly as fabulously as he did in “The Revenant,” when he was involved in a bear fight. As in all of Iárritu’s films, “Bardo” is not only felt in an intense way but also very passionate, with high ambitions to enter not only into his own soul but also into the soul of Mexico.
“Bardo” is his most ambitious and opulent film to date. The director is consistently striving for more, particularly those subtitles that drag on and on.
More About Bardo
“Bardo,” which is now being edited but still clocks in at over two and a half hours, is Iárritu’s attempt at a known genre of magnum-opus auteur project: cinematic memory. Similar to Fellini’s “812”, it shows the life of Iárritu’s alter persona, a well known film director named Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), in a tragicomic, circus-like way.
Since the soundtrack is dominated by traditional marching bands, the first few scenes are really quite fun, flipping farcically between quirky vignettes, milestones, and life markers while blurring the distinctions between them.
It is lively and hectic. Daniel Giménez Cacho’s character, the middle-aged documentarian Silverio Gama, has come to gain recognition from his American colleagues and is also quite popular in his own Mexico.
It is a thinly veiled spoof of Iárritu, who switched to Hollywood projects and films with global settings after his debut in Mexico Set Amores Perros. Despite the proven fact that his 2010 drama Biutiful was a Mexican-Mexican co-production, Bardo marks Iárritu’s return to his native Spain.
When Iárritu tries to slow down the events by weaving awful and sad concepts into his otherwise outrageous strategy, the flaw in this strange technique is straight away apparent.
The goal is to learn more about Silverio—his history, his present, and what makes him tick—but it quickly becomes clear that the presentation is more like a dream that uses lengthy discussions to disclose its own metaphors and remove any sense of mystery. or ambivalence before repeating itself endlessly.
Bardo Release Date
On November 18, 2022, the film will be released in cinemas. On 16 December 2022, Netflix the film will start to air.
People criticize Silverio for making the worker smut from a position of (and to the advantage of) the bourgeoisie; but, the same criticism can be made of Iárritu’s work. At best, Bardo’s political speculations are half-hearted.
Iárritu has little interest in expanding this aspect of present-day Mexican (and Mexican American) identity in a way that isn’t just window dressing for Silverio’s self-reflection, which ends up being equally gestural in the process.
They are mere gestures forward to guidelines for both historical colonial and modern migrant crises.
