This film is up for Best Cinematography, and while I went into it close to sight unseen, I came away pretty satisfied. It certainly makes for a trippy film experience, but as it goes on, the movie opens up in beautiful ways.
Silverio is an acclaimed journalist and docufiction filmmaker who’s achieved renown in both Mexico and the U.S. In the run-up to receiving a prestigious award in L.A., he plans a trip back to Mexico with his wife and children. Along the way, he considers his career, his reputation, his heritage, and his family in inventive and surprising ways.
I’ll be honest: Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a filmmaker who’s often left me a bit cold. Even as films like Babel, Birdman, and The Revenant won awards, I had a hard time fully connecting with them. Bardo is the first Iñárritu film I’ve seen that really works for me, although it’s probably a little longer than it needs to be.
The film slides gently from realism to fantasy/dream/satire/what-have-you—one moment Silverio’s riding the train, the next he’s swimming through the half-flooded car as he chases axolotls. Sections of dialogue suddenly disappear from the characters’ voices and float off into voiceover, and the characters onscreen sometimes acknowledge these disembodied lines, sometimes not. There’s a recurring theme of the child Silverio and his wife Lucia lost, but the film describes it as Mateo “going back inside” Lucia because he “didn’t want to come out.” Throw in segments from some of Silverio’s more ambitious films, and it can sometimes be tricky to tell what exactly you’re watching.
But even when it doesn’t always make sense, it’s always engaging, provocative, and emotionally resonant. As the story progresses, certain elements slip into place, contextualizing earlier flights of fancy and grounding them in a cathartic kind of truth. It’s a beautiful film, one that I think would offer an entirely different experience on a second viewing.
Silverio is played by Daniel Giménez Cacho, an actor I encountered several times back in the mid-2000s when I was getting into both Gael García Bernal and Alfonso Cuarón. I always liked him then, and he’s excellent here. His reactions anchor us whenever the film slips a track, and he allows Silverio to be a complex mix of driven, artistic, proud, stubborn, vulnerable, and a lot more. I’m not familiar with any of the other actors, but I want to shout out Griselda Siciliani as Lucia and Ximena Lamadrid as Silverio’s daughter Camila.
Warnings
Sexual content, violence (including depictions of genocide,) language, drinking/smoking, and strong thematic elements.
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