#Andres Alméida

[rookie-critic]

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022, dir. Alejadro González Iñárritu) - review by Rookie-Critic

I am a huge fan of Alejandro González Iñárritu. I've liked every film I've seen of his. Babel was great, Biutiful was, well, beautiful, and Birdman was absolutely breathtaking. So I went into Bardo with fairly high expectations. I had heard that it was incredibly surreal, but so was Birdman, so I wasn't really surprised. However, to call Bardo just "surreal" is almost underselling the nature of it. If you're a viewer who really enjoys when movies are clear, concise, and lay their stories out plainly and linearly, then Bardo is most likely not for you. It is a tough watch, both because of how bizarre it is and because of its length. Generally I wouldn't necessarily refer to a two and a half hour film as overlong (in the post Avengers: Endgame world, how could you?), but I definitely think Bardo is, and it's indicative of probably the film's biggest fault: it's exceedingly boring. It really pains me to say that, because there are a lot of beautiful, amazing things about this film that I'll talk about a little later on, and I don't want to diminish those things by boiling them down with one of the most basic complaints imaginable, but it is. It's boring. Almost every single scene in the entire 159 minute span of this film overstays its welcome, even the ones that are amazing are lessened with just too much. I don't even know that I really want any particular sequence to be removed, because they're all so crucial to the film's message, but they can all be re-edited, touched up in some way that removes a lot of the fluff (and there's a lot of fluff).

Iñárritu hits an absolute home run with every sequence; he hits the ball out of the park, runs the bases, then runs them again, and then runs them again, and eventually your eyes glaze over as you just watch this happen scene after scene after scene, so much so that when you eventually clock back in and start paying attention again, you're bewildered by the fact that, sometimes, he's still running the bases on a home run he hit well over 10 minutes ago. I had to consistently run the film back more times than I even cared to count because I just kept tuning out. A shot would linger for, I'm not joking, minutes longer than it needed to, and I would miss the first few sentences or the next important moment because my brain had just flown away with my attention in tow. It is so frustrating because, again, when the movie does hit those home runs, it is a remarkable film.

Bardo has so many themes and topics that it seeks to tackle (as Iñárritu's films often do), but I think the one that I kept coming back to, and what I personally believe is the focal point of the film's efforts, is the double-edged nature of being Mexican in the modern world. How does one take pride in their Mexican heritage and culture, one that is unarguably brimming with life and food and dance and an overwhelming brightness and love for all things, while also acknowledging the crumbling nature of the country itself? How do you reconcile that disconnect between so badly wanting to live in this country that, in your heart, is your home, is your heartland, and understanding that things will be better for you, for your family, for your children, to leave it because of its increasing failure to represent the nature of it's culture and be a beacon for its people? On the flip side of that, how do you then reconcile your love for this new land, this new country, that has provided you opportunity and relative safety and this better life, when this country is also, in its own way, crumbling, and crumbling in a way that doesn't accept you or your culture? At that point, where does your culture even belong? Where is its home? These central questions drive Bardo in such a forceful, unabashed way that I absolutely fell in love with. It's tragic, it's sorrowfully funny, it's not easy, and the answers aren't there in a complete way, but Iñárritu seeks to challenge the notion that these things can't live with each other, and I think he nails it, absolutely crushes it, but then he oversells his point. It makes the atmosphere around the viewing experience of Bardo one of patience, of constantly hitting the "up" button on your remote to bring up the timeline so you can check how much longer the film has left to go, and that breaks my heart, because in the forest that is Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, is another Iñárritu masterpiece, it's just locked tightly in a shell of a film that is lesser than the sum of its individual parts.

Score: 7/10

Currently streaming on Netflix.