In Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Netflix 2022), Silverio Gama is a Latino filmmaker who directs "docu-fictions" -- these seem to be serious motion picture essay, something on the order of documentaries by Werner Herzog. Gama has won the Alethea Award ("Alethea" is Greek for Truth) from the American Society of Journalists. But before attending the Los Angeles ceremony in which the award will be bestowed upon him, Gama returns to his native Mexico City where his success in El Norte is feverishly (if also enviously) celebrated -- it seems that acclaim in Mexico is parasitic on success in the United States. Most of the picture takes place in Mexico where Gama endures a series of encounters that epitomize the relationship between the United States and Mexico. The movie is episodic after the manner of Fellini's La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 dissecting the spiritual malaise and melancholy of a Mexican intellectual who has made his home in Los Angelus (and raised his family) in the United States. (We learn that he's been in the United States under a type 0 1 visa for either 15 or 20 years, both durations are stated in the film -- characteristically, the movie is very precise about immigration status.) In one scene, a smarmy Mexican talk-show host accuses Gama of making a film that is "pretentious and oneiric" -- and, then, proceeds to describe the very film that we are watching. Some critics have seized upon these words to claim that Bardo is self-aggrandizing with respect to its director, the famed Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, and "self-indulgent" as well. This may be true but is not necessarily a valid or, even, coherent criticism. After all, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and, even, Ulysses are arguably nakedly autobiographical, pretentious and self-indulgent. But these books are also strange idiosyncratic masterpieces and, I think, the same can be said for Inarittu's fantastically complex and surreal Bardo. Simply put, the film is one of the best of this year or any year and well worth the study required to come to terms with his highy allusive and intellectually complex film. Always beware of critics who claim that a work of art is "self-indulgent" -- in many instances, this just means that the reviewer is unwilling to put in the labor required to interpret a difficult and ambiguous art-work.
Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the literary antecedent to this film, an epic dreamscape that is an allegory of Ireland and its tragic history -- so, similarly, Bardo is a long and vastly ambitious phantasmagoria intended to illuminate the vexed relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor. Some might think that the subject is too personal or beneath their attention -- that it is, perhaps, too remote from the concerns of citizens of the United States. But this condescending view is folly; the United States and Mexico are joined at the hip and what happens south of the Border echoes loudly in the North. (In one scene is Bardo, a name that sounds like "border", a Mexican inmate and cartel member says that Mexico is holding hostage fifty million American junkies.) After all, the infamous Donald Trump came to power largely on the basis of rhetoric about the Border and the "beautiful wall" he was going to build in that place. And, as I write, the administration of Joe Biden, the current U.S. president, is teetering on the edge of a political abyss that will arise when Trump era immigration regulations are lifted and Latinos in the amount of 15,000 a day are poised to swarm across our border. Therefore, Inarittu's epic, although difficult and, perhaps, pretentious, should commend itself to the attention of Netflix viewers in the United States -- we ignore this sort of artistic analysis, the embodiment of complex intellectual cross-currents in the Mexican-American narrative, at our peril.
There's no way to write about Bardo without spoilers and, so, my dear readers, you are duly warned that I am about to unravel the narrative knot that drives the grotesque and dream-like imagery in the film. The title Bardo is literal. The film's protagonist, Silverio Gama, is trapped in a limbo between life and death, the so-called Bardo imagined in Tibetan Buddhism (and recently made famous by George Saunders' remarkable novel Lincoln in the Bardo.) Early in the picture, we hear someone on Mexican TV pontificating about a man who went into a comatose state on an LA subway and was ignored by other passengers -- this event is said to signify the savage indifference to human suffering in the land of money-grubbing and rapacious gringos. At the end of the movie, we realize that the victim in this rather opportunistically interpreted anecdote is the film's hero, Gama. As in Finnegans Wake, Bardo is the "false chronicle" (because all chronicles are false in one way or another) of visions experienced by the protagonist in his comatose state -- the giant Finnegan, HCE (Here Comes Everyone!) is likewise dreaming at his wake. Within these weird and often spectacular visions, Gama encounters a "handful of truths" about his complicated intellectual and spiritual fate as a Mexican transplanted to Los Angeles and as an Angeleno returning after many years to his native country. The framework for the system of dream images, most of which re-occur in different forms and rhyme with one another, is the phantasmagoria of the hero's coma, a structure revealed only in the last ten minutes of this long film -- it clocks in at over two hours and forty minutes. As the viewer watches the film, it's obvious that the imagery is visionary or hallucinated -- the reason for this, however, is only established at the end of the movie. For instance, the film begins with an apparently realistic image of a man's shadow preceding him as he walks across an immense featureless desert lit by the raking light of either dawn or sunset -- we can't tell whether this is a beginning (dawn) or some kind of end (sunset). This uncertainty rhymes with a scene near the end of the movie in which the characters are walking across another similarly desolate desert -- they can't tell whether they are marching north to the border with the United States or going south into the heart of Mexico. The man's shadow begins to run, then, takes flight and skims over the sagebrush and, at last, is metamorphosed into a soaring bird. But the bird drops to earth not once but three times and, after each fall, rises to fly again. (We are reminded that one of Inarittu's best films was about a caped superhero called the Birdman -- Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, featuring Michael Keaton as the tormented actor who in playing the role of the Marvel or DC superhero has somehow been transmuted into a mythical monster-battling status, was shot in one ostensibly continuous sequence and seems in many ways, including its title, a warm-up exercise for the even more ambitious and visionary Bardo). The image of the shadow transmuted from man to bird reoccurs at the end of the film -- it's a flight and an immigration that can't end except in death. Furthermore, the opening and concluding shots in the film chime with a moment in Inarittu's city of dreadful night, the megalopolis in the vale of Mexico, when Hernan Cortes and the hero debate Mexican identity atop a pyramid of Aztec corpses, a scene that ends by revealing that the sequence is part of the movie, the camera pulling back to reveal Klieg lights and scaffolding and disgruntled extras who seem to be changing Suba Pelayo Suba -- that is, Rise up, Pelayo, Rise up, the name of a wildly popular Mexican game show in the seventies. If you look this TV show up on the Internet, you will see that it's emblem was the host climbing what looks like a greased pole (there are many pole-like artifacts lurking around the corners of some of the shots). The idea of climbing relates to ascending north to the United States to make a fortune that can then be imported back into Mexico. And, of course, the image of rising also represents the bird of prey aloft over the desert, that is, the eagle that drops to murder the serpent on the heart-shaped nopal fruit emblazoned on the Mexican flag. Networks of imagery of this sort characterize the movie and nothing that we see occurs only once -- often events take place twice or even three times: once realistically and once (or twice) refracted through the prism of dream. An example is the hero's final trip on the LA metro. He has bought two axolotl salamanders from a store that sells pet fish and, for some reason, is riding on the Metro when plastic bag bursts. The breaking of the bag has various meanings -- it represents the bursting of the amniotic sac, the cerebral hemorrhage that ultimately kills Gama, and the fish-out-of-water experience that Mexican immigrants experience in the United States (and, conversely, that Gama experienced upon his return to Mexico City). This event occurs once realistically with the fish falling on the grimy Metro floor and flopping around helplessly as well as in a symbolic or dream representation in which the subway car fills with fluid so that the hero, like the axolotl, flops around in the water, paddling here and there to find the salamanders that have swam away. The axolotl, like the more prosaic chihuahua dog (Yo quiero Taco Bell) also manifesting from time to time symbolizes Mexican identity. In Mexico, there's a famous book by Roger Bartra that asserts that Mexicans are like the axolotl salamander -- the creature is completely bizarre, never achieving maturity, but living to an old age as a perpetual larva (and for a good measure the little white feathery-gilled salamanders can regenerate missing tails and limbs and eyes and even parts of their brain). The Aztecs both ate and worshipped these fantastical beasts and modern Mexican intellectuals have used them as a metaphor for the Mexican people living as eternal, if robust, larvae under the oppression of the North. The figure of the axolotl is reiterated throughout the movie -- Gama's son Lorenzo tells us that he smuggled three pet axolotl from Mexico City to LA when he was moved to the United States by his father at six years of age. The salamanders died, of course, but the little boy hid them under his bed until they began to rot -- to him, they signified his friends in Mexico City. Later, the boy put them in the freezer and, whenever his mother cooked seafood, was terrified that they were eating his salamander pets. The axolotl, a creature that never matures, is symbolically linked to Mateo, Gama's first-son who is variously described as still-born or dying after only 30 hours. Again, we see two versions of the sea-burial of Mateo. In one version, the tiny infant is removed from a blue silken case -- he is perfectly formed and rests in the palm of his father's hand. Gama puts the baby on the sand on a beach at Cabo San Lucas and the infant comes to life and scrambles into the water like a baby sea-turtle. In another shot, the family (Silverio, his wife Lucia, his daughter from Boston, Camila and his son, Lorenzo) stand hip-deep in the water as Mateo's mother, Lucia, pours the whiff of his ashes into the sea. When Mateo is born, someone says he doesn't want to live in this "fucked-up" world and the doctor obligingly shoves him back into Lucia's womb. A few shots later, Lucia comes from the delivery room and sees her husband, Silverio, in the strange, claustrophobic hospital corridor -- it's narrow and constricted as the birth canal. (As a Mexican intellectual, Silverio is like Mateo, not fully or successfully born.) When she touches Silverio, we see that Lucia is trailing behind her an umbilical cord (the kid has been stuffed back into her uterus) that is about 30 yards long -- the umbilicus represents the connection between Silverio and Mexico, a nurturing lifeline that hasn't been completely severed. In the middle of the movie, when Silverio is trying to perform cunnilingus on Lucia, poor Mateo's head pops and blocks his access. Lucia tells Silverio to just shove the baby back inside her. The film is full of enigmatic or visionary sequences of this sort and, from the outset, we know that there's no grounding in mundane reality here -- repeatedly, people tell Silverio to speak out loud: they can somehow hear his thoughts but his lips aren't moving. (This is due, I think, to his comatose state). As in 8 1/2, Silverio meets his dead father who, at last, tells him that he respects his son -- when he was a boy, everyone called the very European-looking Silverio "darky" to signify that his complexion seemed more indigenous than Spanish. Silverio shrinks to a three-foot tall Hobbit in the scenes with his commanding father (the better referent may be Kafka's "The Judgement" with its cowering miniature son and giant dying father). The ghost of Silverio's father (see Hamlet) tells the protagonist that he should drink success, swish it around n his mouth, and, then, spit it out lest "it poison you." This dialogue occurs in the rest room of the California night club in Mexico City where there is a frenzied party celebrating Gama's fame in the United States. Everyone dances to sprightly cumbio music and, then, to a strangely impoverished version of David Bowie's "Let's Dance" -- it's just Bowie's voice without the accompaniment. (In this film, even the soundtrack is oneiric, a weird combination of fanfares, martial drum cadences, and polka-band music mixed with Mexican pop songs. Inarittu, who writes music, composed most of the sound track -- he's also credited with the script and editing the film.) People appear and mysteriously vanish; enemies engage in long harangues denouncing Gama as a fraud and a charlatan -- he suffers from so-called "Imposter Syndrome", that is, the sense, that his success is all the result of deception and he will soon be discovered to be a fraud. When Gama denounces an old friend Luis who has invited him to appear on his talk show but only for the purpose of humiliating him as a gringo-loving traitor, he forbids the man from replying and Luis' lips become magically sealed. This rhymes with dream appearance on Luis's talk show, Let's Suppose, in which Luis demands that Gama justify himself and his unpatriotic immigration to the United States, a calumny that Silverio is unable to answer -- he remains mysteriously silent. There are a number of staggering set-pieces. In a mysteriously deserted downtown Mexico City (it's the ancient sector of the medieval-looking streets near the Zocalo), Silverio wanders through the gloom. In the window of high-fashion store, he sees a huge tarantula crawling on an expensive gown. Gradually, the streets fill with people. Then, a woman falls to the ground -- people thinks she's dead and, more or less, just step over her body. But the woman isn't dead, only paralyzed (like Silvio in his coma) and says that she's "just missing". Gradually, the streets are strewn with hundreds of people fallen to the pavement. These paralyzed "missing" people have, at least, three meanings: they represent the Mexicans who have left their country for the United States, they signify the "vanished", murdered by the repressive State security forces or the drug cartels, and they remind me of a moment in Mexico City when I was hiking to the Metro station with a young friend enrolled at that time at Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); as we were walking a man just pitched to the ground among the pedestrians hurrying to and from their trains -- my friend, who is compassionate fellow, counseled me not to even look at the fallen figure because, of course, it could be some kind of pickpocketer's stunt and no good could come from this encounter. Silverio steps over the bodies and comes to the Zocalo. A ridge of stony outcropping occupies half of the square -- this is the petrified giant corpse of Centeotl, the Aztec maize god slain by the Spaniards. Gama sees an enormous pyramid of corpses stacked in the center of the plaza. (Pyramids appear from time to time in the movie -- Lorenzo's aquarium houses axolotls swimming around in front of toy pyramid shaped like the structure at Teotihuacan.) Laboriously, he climbs to the top of the pyramid where Henan Cortes, the conquistador, is smoking a cigarette. Cortes and Silverio debate Mexican identity -- Mexicans tend to detest Cortes; indeed Diego Rivera in his great mural cycle at the Government Palace adjacent to the Zocalo shows the conquistador as horribly deformed. But Mexican rage at Cortes is patricidal -- after all, as Cortes tells Gama, he is the father of all of the post-conquest Mexicans. Cortes says that a small rabble of armored conquistadors was able to topple the mighty Aztec empire because "you all hated and betrayed one another." Silverio has been called a traitor to Mexico, in fact, he's been likened to the infamous Malinche, Cortes' indigenous mistress who betrayed her people by collaborating, politically and sexually, with the Spaniards. When Cortes drops his cigarette, it burns one of the naked extras heaped up to represent the dead Indians. The man protests and the camera backs away to show us that the entire sequence is encapsulated within a movie set with lights and a crane for the camera and craft personnel at the foot of the pyramid of corpses. I'm intending to give you some flavor for this unique movie and to annotate some of its more obscure features. Everything about the film is subtly (or not so subtly) visionary and fantastic. In one scene, the hero steps out of his strange house, a place with rooms arranged as in Mexico around some sort of central void -- the house is full of odd nooks and crannies and pitch black rooms and it's an interior landscape that is a labyrinth in which the dying Silverio is trapped. We see that the house is located somewhere in Los Angeles. But when Silverio steps out of the structure we are in a verdant sub-tropical landscape with ancient oaks and yew trees arching over a wide dirt boulevard -- apparently, I think, somewhere in Oaxaca. Later, rooms in the house fill up with sand in an image that derives from Tarkovsky and, I think, Inarrittu signifies the homage by having Silverio step outside into a naked desert where a single, fragile-looking tree (like the tree in the Russian's The Sacrifice) stands against the barren horizon.
The film is handsomely shot and brilliantly edited and, despite its phantasmagoric structure, the picture is coherent. Many of the scenes involve very lengthy tracking shots through mazes of corridors (for instance at Luis' TV studio) and much of the film seems devised according to techniques first developed in Birdman, although ultimately indebted to the famous Copacabana scene in Scorsese's Goodfellas. About half of the movie is shot through distorting fish-eye lenses that seem to wrap landscapes around the central protagonist -- the images make thematic the centrality of Gama's dying consciousness to everything that happens in the movie.
In Bardo, Amazon buys Baja California. Silverio is trying, without success to finagle, an interview with the American president. At the Chapultapec Citadel, he meets an American ambassador and the two men trade nationalistic insults. We see the battle between the Mexican cadets (los Ninos Heroes as they are called in Mexico, martyrs who perished battling the Gringos). Silverio says "Only Mexicans could change this disgraceful defeat into a mythic victory." Later, when Silverio and his family get into a fight with a Latino customs and border official at LAX, the supervisor calls for assistance and the characters are swarmed with "boy-heroes" who perished in the defeat at Chapultapec in the Mexican-American War. At the party at the California night club, one of Gama's brothers brushes his finger across Silverio's lips -- "You've got a little piece of shit on your lip from kissing Gringo asses," the brother says in a jocular way, as if this is the most natural thing in the world.
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