Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Mexican auteur Alejandro G. Iñárritu's first feature film since "The Revenant" is a surrealist, meandering and deeply personal interrogation of his own artistic impulses.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu won a handful of Oscars, pulling off the rare back-to-back director and producer wins for “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance),” which I loathed, and “The Revenant,” which was hated by many but not me. And then, he disappeared from feature filmmaking.

Long creative pauses after disastrous films are not uncommon (see Malick, Terence, “Days of Heaven”). But Iñárritu was at the top of the filmmaking heap commercially and artistically, so his absence — other than a couple of short films — was curious.

He’s back now after a seven-year break with his most personal film, “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.” It’s a surrealist, wandering and autobiographical piece that is essentially the filmmaker’s interrogation of his own artistic impulses.

I predict many people will hate it. Curiously — even to me — I am not one of them.

It’s the sort of movie that is discussed and written about by in film studies classes and disregarded by mainstream audiences. It’s 159 minutes long and there are times when they seem to barely crawl by. The scenes are deliberately disjointed and the narrative is only the slenderest reed upon which Iñárritu balances his usual dazzling, brooding imagery and intellectual-oriented themes.

Let me put it this way: there’s a sequence where the protagonist, a journalist-turned-filmmaker named Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) going through existential crisis, climbs a literal mountain of bodies in the middle of a city square to have an argument with Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, the Mexican equivalent of Christopher Columbus, who is braying about syllogism and how the common people overthrew the old gods — one of whom’s massive, dilapidated body lies slumbering nearby.

Pretentious as hell? Oh, yeah… and yet Iñárritu approaches this goofy material with such a purity of intent, not to mention a willingness to poke fun at his own absurd visions, that I couldn’t help appreciating the bold, daffy illogic of it all.

Silverio is clearly a stand-in for Iñárritu himself, as this film is essentially the Mexican auteur’s autobiographical working out of his own hang-ups and conflicting visions, much in the same way Federico Fellini did with “8½” a half-century ago.

Silverio, who is in late middle age and happily married to Lucía (Griselda Siciliani), is about to receive a major prize (the Alethea Award for Journalism Ethics) for his work, which is largely focused on immigrants illegally crossing the border into the U.S. and other poor Latin communities. He and his family — which also includes 17-year-old son Lorenzo (Iker Sanchez Solano) and daughter Camilla (Ximena Lamadrid), who’s in her 20s, have been living in the U.S. for the last 20 years but are still closely attached to their Mexican roots.

They have returned to Mexico City for a time, where they still keep an apartment, and Silverio is battling through his love/hate relationship with his home country. He despises the pollution and putrid politics, and feels morally compromised by his status as a now wealthy and famous filmmaker. He’s a mass of conflicting impulses and contradictions, and declares himself an imposter, pride and shame mixing freely in his psyche.

“Success has been my biggest failure,” he says.

Silverio refers to his filmmaking style as “docufiction,” and that’s a pretty good description of what’s going on in “Bardo.” Iñárritu uses the bones of his own life as a framework for the story, though he’s constantly playing around with and commenting upon this movie as it’s being made.

Silverio will sometimes forget himself and start speaking in voiceover, which annoys others who have to remind him to move his mouth. Or will call out for Martín, his mostly unseen director of photography, to change or adjust something that’s happening in the scene we’re watching.

Early on he agrees to go on a ridiculous news show hosted by Luis (Francisco Rubio), who used to be his partner many years ago. Think Keith Olbermann mixed with Sean Hannity, and you’ve got a good notion of the blustering buffoon that is Luis. Silverio goes on the program, becomes camera shy and is unable to speak, and is relentlessly mocked by the host for several minutes.

Turns out, he actually ran out without ever appearing, which infuriates Luis. But it’s another example of how Iñárritu is constantly toying with our sense of reality, as we slide constantly between dream, musing, reality and conjecture.

Later, Luis will return to perform a little real-time film criticism of “Bardo,” making fun of an earlier scene where Silverio recalls a battle from the Mexican-American war and it begins to play out in front of him, complete with Mexican youths outfitted in long blond wigs to play the Yanks. Listen closely to Luis’ speech, which is a spot-on summation of how Iñárritu fears his own work is received, as spacey pseudo-intellectual claptrap.

But then Silverio pipes up to defend his artist-self, saying that these are how the visions appear in his mind, and it would be anything less than authentic to present them differently — a glorious, jumbled mishmash that form his own “chronicle of uncertainties.”

Iñárritu wrote the screenplay with longtime partner Nicolás Giacobone. There are many, many other elements and tidbits worth commenting on, if I had the time and you had the patience. Such as Silverio’s obsession with Mateo, a baby who disliked being born and insisted on being put back inside Lucía’s belly. He will occasionally pop his head out at inopportune times, and it’s an odd but deeply touching allegory about the loss of a child.

My guess is most people will be left scratching their head by “Bardo.” Some will laugh at its playful absurdities; others will insist it must be revered as a Very Important Film™; many more will simply decline to see it.

I’ll admit it’s the sort of filmmaking I generally don’t care for — self-indulgent, overlong, concerned more with half-hidden themes than storytelling.

“Bardo” is a construction of lies, imaginings and half-truths as the filmmaker turns the camera upon his own soul to create, in a weird and wonderful way, the most honest of movies.