Director: Alejandro G Inarritu.
Starring: Daniel Gimenez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Solano, Francesco Rubio.
Distributor: Netflix
Runtime: 169 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc

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Rating notes: Strong sex scene

Multi-award winning Mexican director returns home to explore his life, his career, his imagination, his dreams, in a long cinema poem-essay.

Many a writer and director will explain their film as autobiographical, that they have incorporated their life, often their early life, into the screen fiction. Sometimes, these directors are more explicit, such as Ingmar Bergman. However, probably the best-known is Federico Fellini with his creative imaginary and imaginative self-exploration, 8½.

Inarritu was a prominent Mexican director (Amores Perros) more than 20 years ago. He then moved to the US, directing a number of striking and popular films, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, and then winning an Oscar for Birdman, followed by The Revenant.

Now, in his late 50s, he has decided to return to Mexico and film there, often with quite striking locations, from Mexican cities and streets, to many scenes in the desert, and sequences with a vast number of migrants making their way by car and on foot to the American border. There are also scenes in comfortable Los Angeles where he has settled with his two teenage children who are clearly American in accent and interests. He has the continued support of his devoted wife.

The director, however, has decided to make a film which will appeal to an arthouse, specialist audience, rather than a popular audience. It is fair to say that a popular audience would soon be bewildered in their attempts to follow some kind of linear progress of the narrative, in the speeches, in the dreams, in the fantasies. (A critic of the director’s documentary, which is screened before a sequence where he receives an award, but prefers to leave the ceremony, remarks that the film would have been better at 90 minutes – and, perhaps, an audience is aware as they watch that this film that it is 11 minutes under twice that length).

Arthouse audiences who appreciate this kind of visual imagination, thematic explorations of the meaning of life, on journalism and documentary creativity, will not be so concerned about length and mystery. In fact, many have hurried to use the word masterpiece.

It is intriguing to watch the performance by Daniel Ximenes Cacho as Silverio, the director’s alter ego. At first, we see him as an unkempt stranger, a short man, his relationship with his wife and her pregnancy but, as the film continues, we meet a man of lively contrasts, happy to dance, happy to retreat in silence, sometimes extrovert but basically introverted. And, as we watch, scenes which might puzzle as, we realise that they are reconstructions of sequences from his documentary, the 19th century war between America and Mexico and the annexations, money paid, extorted; then towards the end, a dark sequence of a mountain of poor people, interrupted by the director and we see that it is a scene from his documentary.

This is a film which invites us to surrender to its central character, to the style and treatment, to the contemporary themes of Latin Americans in the US (and anger, towards the end, treatment by passport control), to journalism and creative filmmaking, to a range of images that we may not be able to catalogue but where we are invited to make imaginative interpretations and connections.

For many Buddhists, Bardo is the name of the state between death and rebirth.