Bardo (2022)
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a renowned Mexican investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker is the first Latin American journalist to be awarded a prestigious American journalism award. After decades of absence, he travels to Mexico and tensions rise, as his former landsmen and colleagues are less than happy to see him, berating him for leaving and becoming an American shill.
We gaze inwards, into a man who is perpetually inhabiting a liminal space. Neither Mexican nor American, neither rich nor poor, he has to navigate a no-man’s land, depending on the goodwill of people, who are anchored in reality, to give him direction and purpose. Silverio’s mind becomes increasingly scrambled, as his latest docufiction movie bleeds into his day to day reality. Simple walks and conversations turn into grand allegorical long takes of Mexican city and landscapes, imaginary conversations with cartel victims and Hernán Cortés sitting on a pyramid of dead bodies quoting Octavio Paz (an award winning Mexican poet and diplomat).
The cast is fantastic with Giménez Cacho carrying the movie on his back, which almost feels like a one-man-show at times. But the actual star of the movie is the cinematography (Darius Khondji). Thanks to its roller coaster long takes through surreal landscapes, beautiful contre-jour wide shots and intimate close-ups we are taken deeper into a lost man’s shattered perception of time and space, as he grapples with his responsibilities as a father, husband and journalist. The soundtrack consists of seemingly unrelated songs that tie everything together at the end.
This movie is a navel-gazing beautiful mess, showing a liberal intellectual eaten alive by rumination, impostor syndrome and weltschmerz and that heavily relies on its audience feeling the same (which I do, so that’s covered). There is no proposal for change and no policy suggestions, just the painful understanding of oppressive systems and their destructive nature. It is a self-flagellating piece about a strata of people, who understand and suffer, but never do anything against the ails of the world.