Written by Andreas Babiolakis

We’re covering the Academy Award nominees that we haven’t reviewed yet.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu, one of the most gifted, ambitious directors of our time, is finally back over five years after The Revenant, and we get a film that is clearly meticulously toyed over to the point of losing a bit of its directness. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is a tremendous film in ways, but its imperfections are extraordinarily loud, and I think it’s because of Iñárritu’s legacy. As a two time Academy Award winning director (and a couple of other Oscar wins, including Best Picture for Birdman, under his belt), maybe Iñárritu is being lambasted by the masses for creating a film about a tortured filmmaker. If this is meant to be autobiographical (I mean Daniel Giménez Cacho does resemble the auteur quite a bit in his getup), I do think that people are missing the points that surround the “oh woe is me” narrative (which I also think is being misunderstood). My problem with the film isn’t that it’s a meta depiction of Iñárritu’s inner complexities as a filmmaker (if we’re trying to shed the stigma that those that appear happy can’t be depressed, shouldn’t we be doing the same about acclaimed artists?).

My issue is that Bardo is too fucking long for its own good. Iñárritu went to work on this epic after its Venice International Film Festival and lopped off nearly half an hour of its runtime to speed things up a bit. I didn’t see that version. I saw the two-and-a-half hour final cut on Netflix, and even that felt like it meandered a little too much. I have no problem with lengthy, surreal excursions: two of my favourite filmmakers of all time are Theo Angelopoulos and Federico Fellini, whose vignettes and deviations always feel warranted. Bardo is Iñárritu’s version of a film by one of these late greats, but it misses the wonder necessary to guide us along these endless journeys. Iñárritu is cynical, and I love it in the majority of his works. In Bardo, this turns the many ideas into tests or hurdles, so that floaty feeling kind of disappears. Bardo should be feeling like a voyage, not like thirty flights of stairs.

While Bardo feels like an undertaking when viewed all at once, I still admired almost every step of the way individually. These surreal images of a documentary filmmaker’s work and family life are handled quite well. From the first image (a disturbing one at that: a doctor forcing a baby back into his mother’s womb post birth), the tone is set: this is going to be a strange one, folks, but it’s got bite. I needed to know what else was going to be said. Of course the family portrait here (a filmic journalist, his wife, and his angsty son) is shattered again and again, and I absolutely adored almost all of the separate parts of Bardo, whether it’s a reenactment of the Battle of Chapultepec taking place around us,, or someone’s feet being nailed to a stage so they cannot escape. Everything is shot by Darius Khondji via some of the best cinematography I’ve seen in recent memory (Emmanuel Lubezki, you are always missed, but Bardo looks fantastic nonetheless). Once Bardo reaches its revelation (an answer that certainly explains a lot), viewers may be exhausted by then, but it’s proof that Iñárritu had something to say all along: the inner workings of the mind of a visionary may be impossible to truly replicate. He may be right, but Bardo kind of comes close, doesn’t it?

As a lover of postmodern literature (let’s toss beatnik works in there), Bardo reminds me of the works of William S. Burroughs or Kurt Vonnegut, especially the former’s disjointed, startling nature and the latter’s sick sense of comedy. While the film may not fully succeed at what it is trying to do, I’ll gladly sit in the minority and applaud Iñárritu for at least trying to pull off something like Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. I mean, where does one go after winning so many awards in such a short period of time? I do think that this is his weakest film, but it is an ambitiously rich experiment that succeeds more than it fails (and I don’t think it’s getting enough credit). It may sound weird coming from someone that gave Bardo a so-so rating, but I can imagine this film may grow in reputation over time (when it isn’t fun to prod at anymore; it certainly isn’t as big of a mess as some have been saying). There’s some strong artistry here made by a director whose harrowing pictures will only garner more love as the years go by, so who is to say that Bardo won’t develop a cult following in the future? In fact, maybe I’ll come around to it too (when I feel prepared enough to take it on again, that is).

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.