Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths Review: A Filmmaker Surrenders to Hubris

Midway through director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, acclaimed journalist and documentarian Silverio Gacho (Daniel Giménez Cacho) gets into an argument with his old friend and co-worker, Carlos (Hugo Albores), who rants about everything that he hated in Silverio’s latest film. Carlos calls the film aimless, pretentious, politically hypocritical, and overly referential. Sound familiar?

Following Carlos’s diatribe, Silverio dresses down his frenemy for, among other things, giving in to commercial demands as a TV journalist. Before the furious Carlos can even respond, Silverio says that he’s tired of hearing him talk and magically takes away Carlos’s ability to speak. It’s one of Bardo’s many playfully self-referential moments—and certainly not the only one that’s too clever by half—but it’s also an unambiguous flaunting of Iñárritu’s pridefulness and his artistic power as a filmmaker to preemptively shut down his critics and have the last word.

It’s a key scene not only because it most explicitly addresses Iñárritu’s desire to double down on the traits that he’s been criticized for, but because it’s shot through with the arrogance that makes it hard to see Bardo as anything other than a self-consciously audience-wowing vanity project. An elaborate oner of a battle in the Mexican-American War, which plays out as Silverio describes it to a Texan politician, clearly involves complicated choreography of countless moving parts. The same goes for a later scene in which the camera effortlessly glides through the hustle and bustle of the television studio where Carlos works. But the complexity of these long shots seems to exist as nothing beyond a muscular display of craftsmanship.

Of course, Bardo is more than a series of disconnected scenes inspired by Iñárritu’s obsessions and fears. It’s a pseudo-surrealist work of autofiction in which he’s working out his feelings of guilt and displacement from leaving Mexico for L.A. two decades ago. And the scenes where he, by way of Silverio, confronts his conflicted feelings about both places and its people are among the film’s most emotionally gratifying. As Silverio prepares a speech for an award that he’s receiving in Hollywood, his son, Lorenzo (Íker Sánchez Solano), confronts him about why he left Mexico if he loves it so much, and even calls him out for exploiting the suffering of its citizens in his work. It’s a rare scene where Silverio, and thus Iñárritu, appears to ponder and take stock of a criticism laid against him, actually lending him a shred of vulnerability and humanity.

Another through line in the film involves Iñárritu’s loss of his third child shortly after its birth. Bardo even opens with a scene of Silverio’s wife, Lucia (Griselda Siciliani), giving birth only for the baby to surreptitiously request to go back into the womb, claiming that the world is too shitty to live in. It’s an absurdist scene that’s also quite moving, given the actual circumstances that it’s based on. But for every scene that sincerely probes Iñárritu’s past successes or tragedies, there’s a dozen more that are gratingly ostentatious, heavy-handed, snarky, or so superfluous that one may wonder how they didn’t end up on the cutting room floor, prime among them a scene in a club where Silverio gets down to a vocals-only version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.”

Even a scene in which Silverio’s dead father visits him in a public bathroom brings little to the table, what with there being no unsettled business between the two and his father merely assuring Silverio that he’s proud of him before shuffling out the back exit. Aside from the fictionalized paternal pat on the back, the scene exists simply for the visual CGI gag of Silverio’s adult head appearing on a child’s body—a joke that was played out to much greater effect by Mark Prosch as Colin Robinson in the latest season of What We Do in the Shadows.

The Buddhist concept of bardo—the transitional state between death and rebirth—inspired the structure of Iñárritu’s film. It certainly accounts for its perpetual shifting between dreams, memories, and reality, compressing and expanding time and space along the way. It also symbolically positions Bardo as a transitional work in Iñárritu’s oeuvre in the wake of Birdman and The Revenant, though the film doesn’t so much find the filmmaker trying to switch up his customarily ostentatious stylistic tendencies so much as turning up their volume to 11.

Even Iñárritu’s grappling with his heritage and status as a Hollywood power player often leads to tone-deaf showboating, as in a scene where hundreds of pedestrians simultaneously fall down throughout a city block. It’s meant as a metaphor for the thousands who’ve died from cartel violence, but Iñárritu, characteristically, makes it all about him as Silverio wanders down the street, overwhelmed by the sorrow that Mexico’s loss temporarily brings his way.

Of course, films like Federico Fellini’s 8½, a key influence on Bardo, are all about the internal states of their makers. But with that film, one can almost feel Fellini shedding his skin, expanding his form, and coming out the other side a stronger, or at least wholly different, artist. Bardo, by contrast, finds Iñárritu stubbornly resisting change. Indeed, his film feels, nothing more and nothing less, like a hodgepodge of familiar ideas and cinematic tricks, signaling that, perhaps, Iñárritu is unable to push the limits of his own artistic expression.