L‘latest film by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Bardo, false crònica de unas cuantas verdades ie “False Chronicle of Some Truths” begins with the beautiful scene of a subjective take-off. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts the man who produces a long shadow in the desert landscape finally manages to hover in the air and reaches so high that it loses its gaze along the horizon line.
A scene from Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo.
A man (the same man?) Waits in a hospital corridor, the wife is giving birththe child is born, but only a couple of cries are enough for the obstetrician to inform the mother that “the child does not want to leave”, indeed, “he wants to go back to where he came from, the world is shit”.
Success and the right causes
Second day of the festival, second Netflix movie of the official selection, second film that talks about death, the fear it produces in human beings and the countermeasures we vainly adopt to stem it. And the countermeasures in the director’s film 21 Grams, Babel, Birdman (the opening subjective flight comes from there) And Revenant which won three Oscars including best directorthere are many: fame, success, the illusion of working for a just cause, to begin with.
The protagonist is a famous Mexican journalist and documentary maker who has spent the last few years in the United States where he is about to receive one of the most important awards for those who do what he does. That is, to use the son’s words, “To speak of Mexican wretches from the point of view of a bourgeois” mistaking misery for exoticism. And that, in the words of her daughter, she “doesn’t even know how much a subway ticket costs.”
The cast and director of Bardo (Photo by John Phillips / Getty Images for Netflix)
In Venice 79, the8 and 1/2 by Iñárritu
In just barely 3 hours, the 59-year-old director packs a 8 and 1/2 from the numerous quotations within his own work: the documentary about migrants trying to cross the border into the United States looks a lot like Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible), the virtual reality installation that was presented at the 70th Festival de Cannes (in Italy it could be experimented at the Fondazione Prada in Milan) and which was based on the story of real events, including abandoned clothing and shoes (here the bodies of migrants are kidnapped by the Virgin Mary and only their things remain), to make visitors relive a fragment of the journey of a group of refugees.
In Bardo the history of Mexico
Daniel Giménez Cacho as the journalist reflecting on the history of his country just as Amazon is about to buy Baja California and therefore move the border between Mexico and the United States south, it is practically a Roy Schider lookalike in All That Jazzand how the character in the Bob Fosse movie is a man “in midlife crisis” who in the face of criticism from a colleague who works on a talk show with waddling dancers (“How do you spend so much time on one thing? The world changes with every tweet”) badly defends the ethics of his work: “It’s docufiction, there is no difference between reality and fiction. The history of Mexico is all fiction“.
And in the great cauldron that brings together dream and wakefulness, nightmares and metaphors, distorted sounds and images, there is also room for politics: if the US border fluctuates, which has not happened for 175 years, once again it will be possible to speak of “invasion”. Though the American ambassador prefers the term “negotiation”. And immigration from Los Angeles airport is welcomed by an agent with Latin features who decisively denies the protagonist’s family the right to consider that place “home”.
Bard it’s a film that causes indigestion, too much of everything, self-celebration and self-flagellation, philosophical reflection, historical-political analysis and a resounding comparison with one’s own cinema and that of others. All cooked with a lot of pimiento.
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