Review: Bardo, False Chronicle Of A Handful Of Truths

Image courtesy of Netflix.

No one can fault director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in the ambition department. The director's work has included everything from triptych films containing multiple stories and locations - "Babel," "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams" - to grueling epics ("The Revenant") and slightly surreal character studies ("Birdman"). The majority of these films have ranged from good to great.

His latest film - "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths" - is clearly a personal work and an ambitious one as well. It is also, unfortunately, not a particularly successful one. The film is overflowing with impressive imagery and camerawork - a gorgeous shot of a person swimming just under the surface of the water in a pool toward the camera is one, a street strewn with people leading up to a hill comprised of the same is another - but it's often directionless. 

The film opens with a long shadow cast across the sands of desert terrain. The shadow begins to run, leaps, flies through the air and ends up back on earth. The sequence is repeated several times. If there's a better metaphor for the film, I can't think of one - it attempts a gigantic leap, soars for a few moments and then comes crashing back down.

This is not to say that "Bardo" is a bad film. Inarritu is a talented filmmaker, so his latest belongs more in the category of interesting follies that directors with vision occasionally create - movies bursting with imaginative visuals or creative energy that aren't channeled into a cohesive whole. 

The film chronicles the life of a journalist/documentary filmmaker named Silverio (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), who has returned to Mexico from Los Angeles - where he now lives - with his family for a brief stay. He is to return shortly thereafter to receive a prize for his work, which is surprising since everyone whom he encounters seems to have criticisms of his latest film, which we never exactly get a sense of what it's about.

The film is Fellini-esque in its carnival-like atmosphere. Silverio can't ever just walk down a street or into a TV network - where he is to take part in an interview - but rather his surroundings must constantly be bursting with activity, whether it's scantily-clad women taking part in some sort of dance routine, people walking next to Silverio and attempting to have conversations with him, or surrealist touches such as a man in a chicken costume idling about.

One of the film's unfortunate elements is that Silverio appears to be a stand-in for Inarritu himself, which makes one wonder why the character - or director - seems to be second guessing himself in terms of how his audience and adopted country - Inarritu is from Mexico, but lives in the United States - view him. This also falls in line with the Fellini references - in that director's "8 1/2," for example, Marcello Mastroianni's filmmaker character is having trouble coming up with his next film whereas Silverio appears to just be taking a lot of flack in general for his success. But the other issue here is that Silverio engages in a lot of what one could call navel gazing, a charge that could also be directed at this film.

For every stunning visual - an apartment with sand for a floor, a subway floor covered in water with fish swimming about - there are odd (a scene in which Silverio's head is placed on a youth's body as he speaks to his father in a bathroom) and silly (a discussion with explorer Hernan Cortes on top of a mountain of bodies) scenes that don't register as well.

There's also an ongoing theme involving an infant son that Silverio and his wife lost. In an opening scene, the doctor says that the boy doesn't to be born, so he is pushed back into the womb. Later, there's a visually arresting image in which Silverio and his family drop a pint-sized version of the infant into the ocean and it swims away. However, there's also another that maybe should have been left on the cutting room floor during which Silverio attempts to perform oral sex on his wife, only to find the baby's smiling face looking up at him as it pokes out of her vagina.

Inarritu is a two-time Best Director winner whose later work has greatly varied in terms of the types of stories he has told - "Birdman" was a behind-the-scenes look at the theater world, while "The Revenant" was a visually stunning survival tale - but the one constant has been that his films are visually gorgeous and feature virtuoso camerawork. "Birdman," for example, was shot in such a way that it appears to be one single shot.

"Bardo" doesn't stray too far from those aforementioned characteristics - we get everything from fish-eye lenses to long tracking shots through bustling locales - but what's missing is the storytelling that made those previous films strong. There are political diatribes, attacks on modern internet culture (although I can't argue with those), historical lessons, and much more - but these disparate elements rarely cohere successfully.

Inarritu's latest often features interesting things going on in each of its frames, but it has the vibe of someone stuffing all their thoughts and feelings into one movie without knowing exactly what the sum total is meant to convey. It's not a bad movie - just a very busy one that will likely impress with its technical prowess, while at the same time make viewers wonder why these particular scenes are all strung together in one long movie.