The mind whose eye we see through in Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is an accomplished Mexican independent journalist and documentary filmmaker, celebrated in the US. In the film he’s called Silverio Gama, and is played by Daniel Giménez Cacho, but his resemblance to the director, academy award-winner Alejandro G Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) is not cryptic.

The presented premise of the film is that Silverio is receiving a prestigious award (a fictional substitute for the Oscars) that compels him to ruminate on moments in his life and return to his home in Mexico. This premise is misdirection – one’s early attempts to find order in the fleeting, casually paradoxical hallucinations of his life make no sense through this literal lens.

The lucid dreams of Bardo are better seen from a wider view, like that of the 65mm lens in which the film is shot, blurring the edges of each on-screen moment into a sector of a circular reality. A viewer naturally seeks to understand stories by sorting its parts into real and non-real along a linear timeline, but in Bardo those qualities are muddied.

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio Gama in ‘BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. Image: courtesy of Netflix

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio Gama in ‘BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. Image: courtesy of Netflix

The film begins in the desert with an archetypal dream – flying; but not the one where you beat feathered wings, the one where you have to jump, launch yourself into the air and soar weightlessly. Our apparition takes three long leaps, each slower and higher than the last… if the reverie is two leaps too many for you, you’re likely to find Bardo slow and frustratingly vague. But more likely, the sound of the shadow’s amazed gasping breath and the swooping vistas of the arid vastness will lull you into a walkabout. 

“Bardo” is another name for antarābhava, a liminal state of non-physical existence between two lives, which some Tibetan Buddhists believe souls pass through before being reincarnated. This transitional space is the setting of Silverio’s tale, but also an allegory for his relationship to Mexico and the US.

He covers stories of Mexican immigrants, which he is painfully aware relate to his own moving to America story. He has fraught, semi-comedic discussions with his teenage children about the contradictions of modern life as an immigrant. His wife points out how hypocritical it is that whenever someone praises Mexico, he rants about how it’s so messed up, but as soon as a gringo criticises it, he holds forth on how it’s “the most fascinating, gastronomical, anthropological and cultural experiment the world’s ever known”.

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio Gama and Ximena Lamadrid as Camila Gama in ‘BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. Image: courtesy of Netflix

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio Gama in ‘BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. Image: courtesy of Netflix

This is the plight of the integrating immigrant, no matter their financial situation – caught between pride in one’s heritage and the reasons for having left. Silverio sought out free press in the US to write about Mexican politics as an independent journalist, and yet that led to the abandoning of his country and the impression from Mexican liberals that he sold out. 

These crises of identity take centre stage, but Bardo is one of those films about everything; it doesn’t stick to a lane. The focus bleeds into every aspect of Silverio’s experiences, and that’s a lot, too much to find a persisting thread. You need patience and engagement; it’s not a movie to watch while tired.

A newsreader mentions that Amazon is buying the Mexican state of Baja, California, a satirical comment on America’s economic colonisation of Mexico; Silverio delivers a scathing critique of the falseness and compromised ethics of showbiz and multimedia journalism; and after a humorous re-enactment of the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, he chuckles and declares “only Mexicans can turn disgraceful defeat into mythic victory”. Any one of these ideas would have been a strong angle for the film, but by choosing all of them at once, as well as several others, Iñárritu makes it difficult to discern an agenda to his interwoven tale of ample intrigue and minimal continuity.

Production still from ‘BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. Image: courtesy of Netflix

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio Gama in ‘BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. Image: courtesy of Netflix

As a self-portrait of Iñárritu, Silverio is an erratic protagonist. He is often animated and sharp-witted until crucial moments, and then he seems incredulous, a mere observer despite being in the centre of the action. He’s just as anxious and reluctant about the attention and praise he receives, as about the criticism. It’s difficult to know whether it’s Iñárritu or Silverio speaking when he says, “I spend my life trying to convince myself of the importance of what I do, the value of recognition, but when I get it I feel nothing.”

Iñárritu preemptively addresses any accusation that the film is pretentious and indulgent with self-referential critiques that are either funny and clever or a well-worn outfit to disguise insecurity. If he is aware of the film’s flaws and still puts his name on it, the implication is that there must be some other value that supersedes the problems, and thus its faults are transformed into justifications of merit. 

This trick does not always work. Just because you’re aware of your flaws, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Some of the avant-garde imaginings are strange for strangeness’s sake, and their slowness becomes tiresome, giving the film a bloated middle. While the dialogue is excellent, there’s an excess of intelligent well-worded nastiness, smiling insults and resentful compliments. 

Still, these criticisms amount to the nitpicking of an overall fantastic film. Its cynicism is offset by tenderness and love, and even those absurd scenes that initially seem self-aggrandising (like the debate Silverio has with Cortes atop a pyramid of bodies) eventually intertwine with the more chronological parts of the story, creating eureka moments when the random suddenly seems ordered, and even poignant.

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio Gama in ‘BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. Image: courtesy of Netflix

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio Gama in ‘BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’. Image: courtesy of Netflix

The visually unorthodox scenes, often using a camera-tracking single shot, are sometimes slow and sleepy, but always planned around dramatic memorable stills that burn impressions on your retina and linger there. So much happens in Bardo, and so slowly, that it would be difficult to recount the plot. And yet it’s highly memorable as a whole, leaving you back at the beginning with an unexpectedly sweet and appropriately trippy end, and the sense of having witnessed something epic. DM/ML

BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is available in South Africa on Netflix.

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