Bardo Review: Big Netflix Money, Maximum Masturbation

This review was originally posted in connection with bardo‘s theatrical release. It was updated and re-released for the film’s release on Netflix.

The subtitle of bardo, the Netflix movie The revenant and birdman Director Alexander G. Inner, is A false chronicle of a handful of truths. But as long as we append pretentious postscripts, a quote from Macbeth could be more appropriate: Sound and anger, meaning nothing. A lot happens in it bardo, much of it surreal. Elaborate musical numbers, dream sequences, alternate stories, and chronological hiccups all feed into this sprawling, whimsical, personal film. But once the lights come on and the spell is broken, all of these stunning images feel remarkably empty.

to be fair bardos The main character, the celebrated Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), is also tormented by emptiness. He is a man without a country, both in the sense that he divides his time between Mexico and the United States, and in a more abstract, existential way. Silverio used to be a journalist. Then he left his job and his country to start his own business as a documentary filmmaker. He’s achieved tremendous success in his new career, but something still worries Silverio. He is deeply insecure, but at the same time wildly selfish. That sounds like a contradiction, but it’s familiar to anyone who has ever known an artist.

bardo feels like a sketch pad or a series of snapshots that fuse mundane moments with profound ones to form a loose narrative about Silverio’s life. The story begins with the long-ago loss of a stillborn child, Mateo, whose death still haunts Silverio and his wife Lucia (Griselda Sickliani). Literally – Lucia leaves the delivery room, still hanging from the boy’s umbilical cord, which stretches to an endless length and dangles like a tail from the hem of her hospital gown.

Photo: S. De RL de C./Limbo Films

From there, Iñárritu skips to Silverio’s imaginary reunion with an old enemy, in which he is humiliated on Mexican television by a former colleague who accuses him of being too good for his homeland. And then there’s Another Jump, this one brings us to the heart of the story: Silverio is the first Latin American journalist to receive a major award from an American association, and he’s being hailed on both sides of the border to celebrate it.

The events of the film suggest that Iñárritu is framing an autobiographical story in elaborate, stylized metaphors. He’s not a documentary filmmaker Filmmaker, but his Academy Awards – Best Director for The revenant; Best Film, Director and Screenplay for birdman – offer a beautiful, practical parallel to Silverio’s great honor. In addition, Cacho looks like Iñárritu and the men come from the same privileged economic and social class.

Iñárritu castigates himself for his civic sins: Silviero thinks he is a man of the people, but he cannot defend an indigenous maid when she is mistreated at a posh beach resort. He demands to speak to a manager whenever an encounter isn’t to his liking. He dismisses his son’s identity crisis — the boy grew up in both Mexico and California and feels like he doesn’t belong in either place — while harboring his own thoughts about what it really means means

In the end, this particular train of thought leads to Silverio having a smoke with Hernán Cortés (Ivan Massagué) on a pile of Aztec corpses in Mexico City’s central square, a scene that backs down to assure viewers that they aren’t should do. Don’t worry, it’s all a movie. Just pretend a little, that’s all. The scope and artistry of the sequence is impressive, but as a culmination of 165 minutes of navel-gazing (and this is the abridged version: the original cut was 179 minutes), it’s a disappointing note. Similarly, a surrealistic early scene of Silverio driving the LA Metro with axolotls swimming in a foot of water at his feet eventually returns. But again, the payout takes too long to be worth the wait.

Photo: S. De RL de CV/Limbo Films

And these are two of the more compelling structural connections. A lot of bardo Consists of scenes that are unrelated to each other in any meaningful way, and the film’s many time jumps and flights of fancy obscure any emotional truths that lie at its heart. The only sentimental thread that comes through is Silverio’s love for Lucia. But — without intending to offend Siccliani or her alleged real-life counterpart — there’s nothing revolutionary about a one-dimensional hottie who stares adoringly at the camera, always ready for a topless romp, and doesn’t have much else to say.

At a time when the egos of powerful men have taken a beating in the entertainment industry, making such a smug film is something of an achievement. Credit (or blame) goes to Netflix, one of the last places an Oscar winner can amass a bunch of cash and do whatever they want with it. In fact, the selfishness is so strong that after a while it begins to erode the film’s unassuming facade, raising the question of whether this is actually modest satire or simply the year’s most superficial collection of deep thoughts. In any case, the lack of clarity indicates a communication error.

Being a self-proclaimed fortune teller who lies to himself to protect his ego is a fun idea, and early in the film Silverio says, “If you don’t know how to play, you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.” But despite Inárritu’s soft protestations, bardo takes itself seriously. And his sense of self is so limited as Iñárritu keeps droning on that the inverse relationship between his own seriousness and the viewer’s seriousness in taking him reaches a breaking point. The film’s title refers to a Buddhist concept of the borderline between death and rebirth, which ends up ringing differently than its creator might have intended: bardo tries to do so much that it ends up saying nothing.

Bardo: A false chronicle of a handful of truths now streaming on Netflix.