Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths: Iñárritu Film About a Re-Examined Life Walks Lightly Toward the Light
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
The word ‘bardo’ comes from Tibetan Buddhism, although you’ll find the concept in many spiritual traditions. It refers to a kind of limbo, a place between two states of being, between life and death, or death and rebirth, where a person examines their life before moving on.
That “between” space is the setting for the multi Oscar-winning writer/director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s newest movie, and by far his most personal, the beautiful, affecting, and joyful Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.
Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) examines his life from within a limbo called “bardo.”
The man walking through bardo is Silverio Gama, played by the wonderful Spanish-Mexican actor, Daniel Giménez Cacho. Gama is a Mexican born journalist and documentary maker, who’d moved from his home in Mexico City to Los Angeles 20 years prior, initially for a year. But, like Iñárritu, he ended up staying, raising his family, and building a successful career. He’s about to be honoured with a major career award in Los Angeles, and is the first Mexican journalist to receive it.
But first, he’s back in Mexico City, getting ready to shoot his first documentary in his home country since he left. He’s also to be celebrated there for his career accomplishments.
Being back in his home town in these circumstances isn’t completely comfortable for him. Gama is aware of how much time has passed. And in general, all the attention and accolades aren’t feeling as comfortable to him as you’d imagine. He’s wrestling with himself, with accepting his success, with imposter syndrome.
In Los Angeles, he’s seen as accomplished. But back in his home town of Mexico City, where he got his career start, he’s regarded with some ambivalence and resentment from former colleagues. A few accuse him of being a fraud or a sell-out. A prominent TV host Luis (Francisco Rubio) takes gleeful delight at tearing Gama down both publicly and privately.
The strength in Gama’s life is his family. He has a passionate relationship with his wife, Lucia (Griselda Siciliani). They have a teenage son, Lorenzo (Íker Sánchez Solano), and a daughter Camila (Ximena Lamadrid), who is now living and working in Boston.
They’re a joyful bunch for the most part, but, there is a background hum of grief. Gama and Lucia’s first child, a boy they named Mateo, was stillborn. That loss remains a psychic wound in the life of the family, shared by Camila and Lorenzo.
All of these experiences are contemplated by Gama in the non-linear space of the bardo. And therefore the film is not told in a conventional linear narrative.
Instead the movie unfolds like a lucid dream, flowing between scenes of normal life, like the family having breakfast together on an average day, to the fantastical, surreal and sometimes absurd.
An example of the latter: Gama walking down a city street and suddenly walking up a pyramid made of the bodies of the victims of Hernán Cortéz, to confront the Spanish governor about the violence he inflicted on Mexico and the traumatic wound it made in the psyche of the country.
The influence of Latin American literature, the magic realists, and of filmmakers like Fellini, and Buñuel are very present here.
There are obvious parallels between Iñárritu and Gama, his character. Both are directors, fathers and husbands, both culturally Mexican, but with successful careers built in the United States.
The director, who is now 59, and who has spent time in personal therapy, says the core of the film’s idea hit him as he started to reckon with his age; that point in life when you realize that there are more years behind you, than ahead, and what that triggered in him.
As a result, the film is full of questions and ideas. To their credit, Iñárritu, and his frequent screenwriting collaborator Nicolás Giacobone, get to them without labouring or lecturing. There’s a lightness to the way the film unfolds, and humour.
In the bardo, Gama is as much an observer of what’s happening, as he is a participant, and as the film goes on we see him in effect, needle dropping through parts of his life, having conversations, experiences, that start to add up as the film goes on.
Gama, like the filmmaker, thinks of himself as Mexican, shaped by the culture, and the history and traditions. But the trip to Mexico City underlines how after 20 years as an Angeleno, he also feels American. Slightly estranged from a culture he left several decades ago, and yet not completely part of the culture where he currently lives, Iñárritu is saying that immigrants, live in a kind of cultural bardo that affects identity, and a feeling of belonging.
This quality of searching is partly what Iñárritu seems drawn to as a writer and director. He tends towards making imaginative engaging movies that have a philosophical undercurrent, that ask big questions, most often centred on men going through some kind of existential crisis.
We’ve seen it in movies like 2014’s Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which won best picture, and best director and shared a screenplay Oscar, or 2015’s The Revenant, which won him his second Oscar as Best Director.
It’s high minded stuff, but Iñárritu, has a knack for wrapping these ideas in movies that are well crafted and exciting to watch.
Bardo, like his other movies, is visually beautiful, with richly designed sets. Shot by Darius Khondji, the camera follows the action in long shots as the characters through multiple scenarios, as the real gives way tot he surreal and back again. Bardo is gorgeous to look at.
But the key to Bardo’s success is the performance of Spanish-Mexican actor Cacho, as Gama, who is in every scene in the movie. In a film that has a non-linear structure, it falls on Cacho to be the emotional center, to give us a man who is searching, juggling contradictions, alive to his life, sometimes self-involved, but also open to love and attachment. Cacho manages to walk lightly through Gama’s life, and he fills the screen and the movie with warmth, intelligence and compassion. It’s an outstanding performance, and one of the finest of the year.
Iñárritu isn’t forcing his conclusions about what life is about on us. He presents us with a worthy person taking a walk through a life where there was much to love, much left to resolve, and in the end, one that like Gama, we must all one day say goodbye to.
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, written by Alejandro González Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone, directed by Alejandro González. Starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sánchez Solano. In theatres, Friday, November 18.