It's no surprise — perhaps it was even inevitable — that one of the more widely criticized scenes in "Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths," Alejandro G. Iñárritu's magnificent and maddening new movie, would feature an artist confronting his most outspoken critic.
The artist — and the movie's protagonist — is Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), an acclaimed journalist and documentary filmmaker making a return trip to Mexico several years after moving to Los Angeles. The critic, whom he runs into at a party, is Luis (Francisco Rubio), a TV personality who has made Silverio a regular punching bag on his talk show. Predictably, Luis is no fan of Silverio's latest work, dismissing it as "pretentious," "a mishmash of pointless scenes" that "lacks poetic inspiration." But for him, Silverio's gravest artistic crime is not his self-indulgence or his betrayal of his Mexican roots but rather his coyness, the way he hides his true self behind teasing metafictional layers: "If you want to talk about your life," Luis says, "tell it straight."
That could well be a dig at the predictably divisive, relentlessly zigzagging "Bardo" itself, a semi-autobiographical fantasia that blurs the line where Silverio's life ends and Iñárritu's begins. The movie (which the director co-wrote with Nicolás Giacobone) is a carnivalesque romp through time and memory, one that owes something to the labyrinthine magic realism of Jorge Luis Borges and something to the jaunty surrealism of Federico Fellini. Iñárritu and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, send their camera floating across sun-drenched sands and barreling down corridors of consciousness, collapsing barriers between history and hallucination, comedy and drama, life and death, Silverio and Alejandro. For both men, the movie — Iñárritu's first to shoot primarily in Mexico since his 2000 debut feature, "Amores perros" — marks a rare homecoming, a return marked by joy and nostalgia, but also ambivalence and frustration.
