Everything about Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film is on a grand scale. The themes and ideas—which include identity, Mexican history, race, success, family, and mortality—are huge. The level of cinematic ambition is huge. Even the full title – “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” – is a lot to wrap your head around.
But sometimes, the bigger they come, the harder they fall — and in its initial screenings at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, the highly anticipated “Bardo” has gotten off to a rocky start.
A phantasmagorical and surreal tour through the memories, dreams and existential anxieties of a famous Mexican journalist-turned-filmmaker named Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), “Bardo” represents above all a journey of personal exploration for Iñárritu. Named after the Buddhist concept of a limbo between death and rebirth, “Bardo” unravels the complex and fraught identity of a Mexican immigrant who, like Inárritu himself, moved his family to the United States for the sake of his career and achieved tremendous success. only to find himself a man without a place.
Every Iñárritu project comes with an incredible pedigree, which Netflix — releasing “Bardo” in Mexico on Oct. 27 and select U.S. theaters on Nov. 4 before making it available for streaming on Dec. 16 — would naturally tap into his continued pursuit of the Oscar. glory. All of Inárritu’s films, from his 2000 debut “Amores Perros” to his epic 2015 survival thriller “The Revenant,” have earned at least one Oscar nomination (“The Revenant” won 12). He is one of only three directors to win back-to-back directing Oscars, for “Birdman” and 2014’s “The Revenant,” the former of which also won best picture.
But if Netflix hopes to follow the awards-season book it set with 2018’s “Roma” — another highly autobiographical film steeped in Mexican culture and history, directed by Iñárritu’s friend and countryman Alfonso Cuarón — it looks like “ Bardo” will face a tougher road on Oscar night.
As Times critic Justin Change of Telluride wrote, “[Iñárritu] he is hardly unaware of his reputation in some circles as an arrogant showman, a director who flings the camera around with empty virtuosity and shock.” And “Bardo” — which runs nearly three hours and has nothing resembling a conventional narrative structure — has been hit in turn by a wave of festival critics who deemed it a pretentious and bloated exercise in self-indulgence.
The Times spoke with Iñárritu on Sunday as he prepared to leave Telluride about his inspirations for “Bardo,” the perils of success and how he feels about the often harsh criticism the film has received. (Spoiler alert: He strongly disagrees.)
All of your films have taken huge turns and involved huge creative risks. But it also involves huge risks for you personally, because you put so much of yourself into it and you’re taking parts of yourself out. Does it feel more vulnerable for you to show “Bardo” to the world than your previous films?
I think it’s important to understand that this is a fictional film. But I definitely brought in a lot of personal things that I’ve been through in order to navigate the themes that are very universal in my view of what this character is going through.
Ultimately, for me, the film is about a fractured identity and the sense of displacement you get after a few years outside your country, no matter which country. There are so many millions of people in the United States who have come from so many different countries, and the process of integration comes with a disintegration. You begin to lose the sense of the roots that give meaning and strength to that tree. This is the space between what I call the “bardo”.
That feeling is something I know well, so I brought in things that were obviously very personal – especially emotionally – but it’s fiction. It’s not a movie for me. Nothing would be more boring than that [a film] for me, for God’s sake—I’ll never do that. But I can talk about it [theme] from a very particular point of view.
Gimenez Cacho as Silverio and Ximena Lamadrid as his daughter in a scene from “Bardo”.
(Limbo Films, S. De RL de C.)
Coming off The Revenant—which is a much more outward-looking film with big action sets and genre elements—why did you feel the impulse to turn more inward?
I think it has to do with my age [59] and the time that has passed. When your children grow up, there are challenges in trying to understand the decision I made – or any immigrant – to leave your country. When you leave your country, it comes with many hopes and plans for the future, but inevitably also many uncertainties and contradictions, paradoxes and challenges. So this is what prompted me five years ago that I began to feel the need to take a journey within.
The film is about memories, and memories and dreams are timeless. Luis Buñuel had a line that I love: “A film is a dream being directed.” All these very intimate but very epic things build us as human beings, and I tried to put everything – it’s like in Mexico we have a soup called pozole. For me, it was an exercise in cinema, figuring out how to tie it all together without an act one/act two/act three [structure] or a genre to guide me. It was like an adventure of consciousness.
Among the many things Silverio’s character is struggling with is his own success. Although he is preparing to receive a great prize, he is plagued by this feeling that he cannot enjoy his achievements or that he has not earned the success somehow. You have experienced tremendous success and won great prizes. Is that kind of anxiety something you’ve experienced?
Absolutely. You don’t have to win an Oscar to be successful; it can be anything you pursue that you think will change your life, but then it doesn’t necessarily bring you what you thought it would.
Success to me is like a bowl of smoke that when you catch it, it disappears. It’s a mirage. My father used to say the line to me [in the film], “Be careful with success. Just take a sip and spit it out because if not, it could be poison.”
In the film, Silverio comes in for some harsh criticism from a former colleague, who tells him that the documentary project he’s working on is too long, too self-indulgent, too pretentious. The same criticisms have been leveled at “Bardo” in some of the early reviews. Did you include that criticism in the film as a way to thwart the critics?
It’s funny you brought that up because, yeah, I predicted it because it’s so predictable. I haven’t read any comments because I’m trying to enjoy the trip with my family, but what I got from the team is that this charge definitely exists. And I laugh my ass off. Because it is very easy to fall into the temptation to make these predictions. I think it was a trap that [the critics] it went down too easily, especially in the culture we’re in, which is so reactive and so polarizing.
I think I have a right to explore identity because I went through this sense of displacement and I think I have a right to talk about it. I think I have the right to speak about the collective identity of my country. This film is a love letter to my country and I am privileged to be able to use my voice to really speak not only for Mexicans, but for anyone who feels displaced.
it [film] is not self-referential. This is not narcissistic. Its not ME. But I want someone to explain why I don’t have the right to talk about something that is very important to me and my family. If I were from Denmark or if I were Swedish, I would be a philosopher. But because I did it in a visually powerful way, I’m pretentious because I’m Mexican. If you’re Mexican and you make a movie like that, you’re a pretentious guy.
I don’t know if [the critics] have read Jorge Luis Borges or Jorge Cortázar or Juan Rulfo, but they should read where these things come from and our fictional tradition of combined time and space in Latin American literature. That for me is the basis of the film. Why don’t I have the right to work in that tradition the way I like to do it?
In fact, that’s right at the heart of the character’s conflict: this identity politics, the idea that a Mexican can’t do these things, that he’s too pretentious, too smug. If it was a blond guy, another director, they can talk about their culture – their culture is something we understand.
You may like it or not – that is not the discussion. But for me, there’s a kind of racist undercurrent where because I’m Mexican, I’m pretentious. If you don’t understand something, you don’t need to blame anyone. Guys, take some time and look at all the layers.
Every artist has the right to express themselves as they wish without being accused of being self-indulgent. I hope one can reject that narrative, which is very reductive and a bit racist, I must say.
Many critics have compared “Bardo” to other films in which directors have investigated their inner lives and their pasts, such as Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2” or Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” or “The Tree of Life” by Terrence Malick. Do you see “Bardo” as a decline in that tradition?
References are very limited. Borges and Cortázar were my two favorite guys – I had posters of them when I was 17. This to me is in the tradition of that imaginary. I think this movie is very Mexican at its core. I am very excited about the Mexican reaction because basically it is a film that speaks a lot about ourselves.
Fellini was a genius, but he didn’t invent imagination in film. There is culture outside of Anglo culture. Let me tell you, we [Mexicans] we have little culture, we have little emotion and imagination and baggage. And I have the right to talk about it and not be referred to as, “Oh, he’s trying to imitate this or that.”
This is a movie that was clearly made to be seen on the big screen, and Netflix is planning to give it a strong theatrical push. But anyway, did you fight the idea of working with Netflix at all given how much streaming has disrupted the theater business?
When you make a film in a foreign language, it is not very easy to find finance, especially with the demands that this film had. I started financing it myself and faced rejections from most studios. Then Netflix came along and the deal was, “I’m going to shoot it on 65mm and it’s going to be a very immersive experience, so I need the theatrical release”—I mean, that’s the only way I can figure out to t made these films. And they agreed and they have given this and I am extremely grateful. To give this movie a seven-week release in Mexico on multiple screens — that’s breaking their business model. The support and freedom they gave me on this film was massive. Honestly, I couldn’t have done it any other way.
This movie is more of a state of mind than a movie. The center of gravity is emotional and visual. I’m sorry that some people didn’t understand it in that sense, or want, again, [make] a personal accusation. But I’m very proud of it. Cinematically I think it’s my greatest achievement, much more than The Revenant or anything else. I know it will stay [the test of] the time.
But we will see. The film should speak for itself, not me. I think that’s what I believe in.
