‘Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’ review: Alejandro Iñárritu at his glorious, self-indulgent best
Through a story about a journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker, Alejandro Iñárritu blurs the line between fact and fiction to create a surreal epic that feels like a fever dream
(Originally published in The Hindu on December 18, 2022)
Only after more than halfway into Alejandro Iñárritu’s ‘Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’ does one realise that even the title of the film is a play on the structure of its unique screenplay. The term ‘Bardo’ is said to be a mystical state between death and rebirth when life’s deepest memories reemerge over the fading consciousness. These memories aren’t remembered for what they actually were but for how they felt and were remembered. It’s a state where facts and fiction are indistinguishable. ‘False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’, on the other hand, is the surrealistic documentary feature that the protagonist of the film, senior journalist and documentary filmmaker Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), has made on the plight of the immigrants from Mexico and on his own life as an immigrant and journalist living in the States.
Akin to the title, Iñárritu places these two narratives closely to each other and seamlessly blends them to create a movie that majorly feels like a fever dream. And like the title design, the documentary feature eventually becomes only a part of the larger narrative enclosing Silverio’s life. The film unpacks Silverio’s life, with all the trauma, pleasure, and everything in between. As a father, Silverio struggles with his son Lorenzo’s (Iker Sanchez Solano) stand on his cultural roots, even when he himself struggles with it. He wishes his son never grew into this teenager who is too….teenager-like. As a husband, he grapples with the loss of youth-like passion with his wife, Lucía (Griselda Siciliani). Even when he has attained everything one could wish for — he is just in due for a prestigious award, he has secured an interview with the U.S. President, and his documentary is being well-received — he feels undeserving of them all and he wishes to go to a home that doesn’t exist anymore. Undealt issues from the past, like everything he wishes he had told his dad, are also fleshed out in form of hallucinations.
However, Bardo is more about an affluent immigrant’s feeling of homelessness, identity crisis and guilt over the privilege that many do not get. The very first shot of the film shows…..