Following in the footsteps of renowned filmmakers who delve into their past to create works of an autobiographical nature -Cuarón, Sorrentino, Almodóvar or Branagh, to name a few- now it is the turn of Alejandro González Iñárritu with his most personal film, in which envelops with an aura of colossal ambition and long sequence shots.
Bardo, false chronicle of a few truths is built as a kind of monument that aims to cover many topics in a journey full of nostalgia, surrealism and comedy in which his alter ego Silverio Gama, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker played by an excellent Daniel Giménez Cacho, travels through various emotional aspects of Iñárritu's life in an exuberant staging in which references to Mexico are not lacking - attention to the bloody conquest of Hernán Cortés -, paternity, fear, the loss of a son , violence, or the feeling of feeling like a foreigner every time you travel to the United States, a country where you have lived for two decades.
"I liked the idea that the protagonist was a documentary journalist because it seemed to me that the character's crisis is the crisis of fiction and reality. As journalists they pursue the truth, which today slips from our hands everywhere. What is the truth? Those narratives and those who build them seemed very interesting to me. A journalist can look through his profession to different realities, just like a filmmaker does, "says Iñárritu during his visit to the last San Sebastián festival to present the film . The Mexican director says that in his other titles he has dealt with the subject of immigration, from Babel, Biutiful and Carne y arena, and "that reality has allowed me to get into worlds that go beyond cinema and fiction."
For the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant, who hadn't made a film in seven years since the acclaimed western that gave Leonardo DiCaprio the coveted golden statuette, making this story has been "a cathartic and necessary process. I think it can even irritate many people. I had the need to put things in order at my age, after being 21 years outside my country. All that that implies, all the cost of that state of mind and the feeling of displacement have filled many of my reflections, my fears, decisions and questions. I wanted to put all that in order and share with my heart, vulnerability, fragility and risk, because there is a lot of risk when you make a film like this. It has also been a cathartic process for my family ", He points out about Bardo, which opens today in limited theaters before arriving on Netflix on December 16.
The film, with an original footage of 174 minutes, participated in the official section of the Venice festival, where it divided the critics and left empty. During the presentation in Donostia, the director decided to cut 22 minutes. "I finished the film two days before going to Venice and since I was the editor I never had the opportunity to see it with people, friends and collaborators. Certain visual effects put me against the wall and I immediately realized that I could work on the internal rhythm of some scenes. The film is intact, it is the same. What I did was attend and enter with a more daring synthesis capacity to the same themes in a faster way. In fact there is one more scene that was not in Venice and I removed things. Musically I also did some mixes and in the end it ended up thinner and I feel very satisfied because for me a film is not finished until it is taken away from you. It is an indefinite process, "he justifies himself.
In that whirlwind of plots that the film shows off, a large company like Amazon is about to buy Baja California. "I tried to put in as much humor as possible," he says. "I have realized that things that were very painful now I can see them more lightly, I can laugh at them. And things that did not seem so important to me today move me. In 1846, the American invasion took away half of the country for 15 million pesos. Today the corporations are becoming the new governments, they are buying the world. It is not a lie, they could buy entire countries. Theirs is also an ideological invasion, they print a way of seeing things with their global media , they start the conversation without us noticing. So the invasion continues."
While the critics of Venice linked Bardo as Fellini's 8 and a half, the filmmaker prefers to refer to writers such as Borges or Cortázar. “There is a lot of ignorance, especially Anglo-Saxon. No one in Los Angeles has told me about Octavio Paz, no one knows him. They talk to me about the gardener...what I want to say is that we have our own culture with a very powerful, ancient imaginary, and literature, since García Márquez, has influenced me a lot. Fellini is one of the great film directors, but there is more of Buñuel in Bardo than there is of Fellini”.
And in the face of adverse criticism, he points out: “It is good that people react against a film. A movie that everyone likes is very suspicious. Indifference for me is the worst punishment.
