He had wanted to take a step back from his career after his best director Oscar obtained for the Revenant (2015). Alejandro González Iñarritu 59, breaks the silence with his new feature film with the enigmatic title, bardo, false chronicle of some truths, available on Netflix Friday. The story of Silverio, Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker who is about to receive a prestigious distinction. Based in Los Angeles, he returns to his native country, but this trip confronts him with an existential crisis that brings back his anxieties and traumas from the past…
The sum of all the filmmaker’s preoccupations, this introspective story is overwhelming in its form: a trip sometimes dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, resolutely experimental, daring and radical, without narrative thread, where you have to accept to let go, to abandon yourself in the labyrinth. mind where it is a question of identity, immigration, family, death.
Invocation of Dalí, De Chirico, Magritte and Jodorowsky
In line with Terrence Malick, with the difference that perpetual motion supplants contemplation, he chooses to use the wide-angle camera to give an incredible scale to each shot, to evoke the consciousness of the character wandering in the meanders of his brain. A visually sublime UFO that may seem hermetic at first glance, until the dikes give way. “Bardo was born from the need to express my feelings about certain things that I have experienced, explains Alejandro González Iñárritu. I believe that age played a role, I could not have undertaken such a project younger. »
He claims an autofiction fueled by intimate experiences, but whose scope is universal. He didn’t plan anything, everything happened organically. “Luis Buñuel said: ‘A film is a directed dream.’ I invite the public to take a sensory journey through my memory where memories collide, where temporality is blurred, where logic disappears. »
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Science, culture and freedom of expression are threatened, the truth is manipulated to serve an ideology
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The filmmaker thus confesses his vulnerability, his doubts, his questions, in this unclassifiable, cathartic and chaotic work, both an x-ray of his psychological state and a mirage. “There is nothing to understand and everything to feel, he warns. I refer to surrealist artists who broke conventions: Salvador Dalí, Giorgio De Chirico, René Magritte, Alejandro Jodorowsky… Never underestimate the power of our subconscious. »
The virtuoso cinematographer Darius Khondji abandons his twilight palette to deliver a luminous photograph, imbued with spirituality, according to the will of the director. This contrasts with the darkness of the observation. “Our world is ruined, he asserts. How did we go from an enlightened civilization to medieval obscurantism? Science, culture and freedom of expression are threatened, the truth is manipulated to serve an ideology. Today, 10 million people think the Earth is flat. Society is regressing, becoming radicalized and going mad. »
Bardo, false chronicle of some truths***, by Alejandro González Iñárritu, with Daniel Giménez Cacho. 2:40 a.m. Friday on Netflix.
In “Bardo, false chronicle of some truths”, Alejandro González Iñárritu delivers an intimate version