bardo (w&d iñárittu, w nicolás giacobone)

Iñárittu is a showman and Bardo is nothing if not a show. From the opening, a delirious, icarus-esque swooping over the desert, segueing to an underwater sequence on the LA subway, to a bravura non-interview in a Mexican TV studio, to the close, the film is composed of vivid, sometimes delirious sequences where the camera jockeys for position with text and actors. Once again Iñárittu frequently uses a fish-eye lens, as though he is trying to cram as much information into the screen as it can take. The nods to other filmmakers, in particular Tarkovsky, are explicit. Like many a gaudy show, it is in danger of outstaying its welcome once the bells and whistles become predictable, even repetitive. We know when we enter the gents in a vast Mexican club that we’re not going to go out the same way we came in, that this is just a portal to another cine-set which is waiting behind the next door.

This is undeniably an imperfect film, but perhaps all the better for being warts and all. The themes the filmmaker addresses are interlocking: family, fame and Mexico. It probably helps to know something about Mexico and its relationship with the USA to get the most of the film, which opens with the conceit that Amazon is going to buy Baja California and a vast set-piece sequence about the Mexican-USA war of 1845. The protagonist, Silverio is a Mexican filmmaker caught between two worlds, just like Iñárittu, struggling to retain his Mexican identity when he has made his career in Hollywood. The typography of the credits alludes to the Mexican flag, and the times when the film becomes most discursive is when characters address the dichotomy between being Mexican and remaining in Mexico, or leaving it. It should be remembered that it’s not just the director who heads North. In large swathes of Mexico much of the population has crossed the border to find work. In this sense, the Silverio/ Iñárittu journey reflects that of much of the nation, even if the majority of those exiles’ arguments about their reasons for having left might be less recondite.

At the same time, the film is a telling celebration of the capital, DF. Most of the film takes place in its streets and there are times when Bardo captures the glorious dissonant energy of Mexico DF with real aplomb. This is a very different DF to Cuarón’s ode to the city in Roma. (In Bardo the indigenous maid is refused entry to the beach, so she wouldn’t be able to save the children if they were in danger of drowning, a telling indictment of the country’s classist society). Iñárittu’s Mexico is wild, sweaty, drunken, consumed by family and friends, petty jealousies and deep loyalties. The very messiness of Bardo, its incompleteness, feels completely authentic to the culture it is seeking to portray. Down to the complexity of Mexican identity, as noted by a scene where Cortes claims to be the first Mexican on top of a pile of indigenous bodies in the Zocalo (another ‘spectacle’), or when Silverio is mocked in a fictitious interview for his ethnicity. Mexico is a melting pot and has been for thousands of years, the Spanish just added more blood to the mix. Bardo grapples with the multiple contradictions of Mexico and being Mexican with more than enough vigour to compensate for the director’s self-indulgence.