Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’ on Netflix, Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Flummoxing Self-Examination of Life and Art

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (now on Netflix) will not narrow the gulf between Alejandro G. Inarritu supporters and haters. Not in the slightest. In recent years, several upper-echelon directors have gotten their 8½ on – Cuaron, Branagh, Spielberg – by delving into autobiography, and Inarritu joins them with Bardo, his first film since his remarkable back-to-back best director Oscar wins for The Revenant (2015) and Birdman (2014). Anyone who knows Inarritu’s work won’t be shocked to learn that Bardo finds him spelunking his own navel for nearly two-and-three-quarters hours; you can just HEAR the gulf widening even further, can’t you?

BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A long, towering shadow of a man is cast on the desert. It moves forward, then takes big, long leaps, nearly achieving flight. Next, a long hospital corridor. Inside one of the rooms, a child is born – but it didn’t want to be, so the doctor gently puts him back inside Lucia (Griselda Siciliani). It was pretty easy, since she hadn’t even vacated the stirrups yet. The boy’s father is Silverio (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), Lucia matter-of-factly tells him what happened, and the general vibe of the convo is, well, hey, who can blame the kid? They leave the hospital, although he has to cut a long, long, long, long umbilical cord holding taut from beneath her hospital gown first.

In the next scene, Silverio is on a commuter train that suddenly and out of nowhere is full of ankle-deep water. He meets with a U.S. ambassador while the Mexican-American war of 1847 rages nearby. He makes his way through the bustling corridors and soundstages of a massive TV studio where he sits down to be interviewed for a live broadcast, and doesn’t reply to any of the heated, critical questions aimed at him. He goes home to Lucia, and he talks without moving his mouth. Soon she opens her shirt and teases him and he chases her around and through a house that seems to go on and on like a labyrinth; when he finally gets her in bed and his head travels down her torso, he sees the baby’s head sticking out of there and he has to push it back in. Buzz. Kill.

The movie goes on like this, in a surreal fashion, all frustrating dreamlike scenarios doling out bits of plot that seem insignificant, e.g., that Silverio is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who’s receiving an award from the very same Americans he criticizes – an award that may be more an act of political diplomacy than a celebration of his work. He and Lucia live in Mexico with their teen son Lorenzo (Iker Sanchez Solano); their daughter Camila (Ximena Lamadrid) lives in Boston. They have a home in Los Angeles too, where they raised their kids and Silverio worked but never felt like he belonged in the country. His fame and success afforded him all manner of creature comforts, but without the comfort. He frets and dwells on his hypocrisy, he feels unworthy of what he has, and when the award ceremony and party in his honor finally happens, everyone he sees there reminds him of his deeply personal failures and calls him “cabron” and all he wants to do is dance with his wife and son and daughter, but any number of surreal occurrences keep interrupting him from living in a sensical narrative.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Fellini did the surreal self-examination thing better in the aforementioned 8 1/2 (although I’m not sure I necessarily loved it when he did it, either.)

Performance Worth Watching: Siciliani is a steady, grounding presence as the wife of the artist who’s lost his grip on reality.

Memorable Dialogue: The doctor to Lucia, who’s just given birth: “He wants to stay inside. He says the world is too f—ed up.”

Sex and Skin: Some graphic female nudity.

Our Take: With Bardo, Inarritu at least foregoes the This Is How The CINEMA Defines Me stuff, and sticks with a brutal M.O. of self-evisceration disguised as self-examination, funneled through relentlessly drawn-out, technically dazzling, uncompromisingly artful, thoroughly confounding (and surely expensive) sequences held together by dream logic. Inarritu is a long-take master, staging wildly complex scenarios captured by a camera that glides and follows and swoops and tracks and only stubbornly cuts away.

This is precision filmmaking at the service of an imprecise narrative that could be the work of either an enormous ego or a restless artist – although both could be true. Such is Inarritu. Take him or leave him. And with Bardo it sure feels like we get all of him, his guts and grief and embarrassment, his deeply psychological impulses, via an avatar that is the Silverio character, trapped in one hell of an existential quandary. The filmmaker ponders grand ideas about home, family, work, art, parenthood, success, fame, sex, heritage, foreign relations, colonialism, aging, mortality – am I missing anything? Almost certainly.

The film is gorgeous to the eye, ambitious, impossible to follow, frustrating, exhausting, befuddling, a glorious exercise in anti-discipline. Inarritu has exacting control over what’s in the frame and how it could possibly provoke an audience, but he apparently feels he has no control over a single damn thing outside of that. Whether you want to crawl inside his skull and experience the bewildering and hypnagogic maelstrom of his point of view? It’s a lot to ask of us. Too much.

Our Call: Way too much. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.