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Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s upcoming surreal black comedy, Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, his follow-up to his acclaimed, Oscar-winning epic, The Revenant (2015), finds the writer/director returning to the world of art, ego, showbiz, and existential status akin to his 2014 Academy Award Best Picture winner, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).
The trailer for the film, which goes into a limited theatrical release next month before hitting Netflix on December 16, 2022, posits its protagonist, documentary filmmaker Silverio Gama (noted Spanish actor Daniel Giménez Cacho), engaging with or simply making his way through fantastical imagery as sequenced to the 1967 Beatles classic “I Am the Walrus,” which doesn’t actually appear in the finished film.
A Troubled Filmmaker Goes Through the Motions
This look at Bardo (a Tibetan word that means transition) begins with a shot of the shadow of a man, Cacho’s Silverio, running through the tumbleweeds in the desert. The titles tell us that the film was the Official Selection at the Venice, Telluride, Morelia, and BFI London Film Festivals.
Then we see the back of Silverio’s frazzled head of hair as he is led by a man of the cloth through the hallways of a temple with stained-glass windows, and then to a major establishing shot of a white suit-attired Marching band timed perfectly to look like they are performing the fab four’s psychedelic hit. Spliced into this colorful, continuously moving action is the announcement that this is from “the Director of Birdman and The Revenant.”
Throughout the busy, bustling trailer, Silverio can be seen partying at a neon-lit disco with friends and lovers (or both). There is also the scary context-less shot of a body levitating from a bed in a dark room and a few random shots of Silverio’s female cast members, such as Griselda Siciliani as Lucia and Ximena Lamadrid as Camila.
A glimpse of a battle scene set within the walls of the Chapultepec Castle, depicting young Mexican soldiers fighting American invaders in 1847, ups the epic ante, especially as we witness a man plummeting from a rooftop to his death before Silverio’s eyes. From there, we get fleeting shots of a baby being delivered at a hospital by a masked doctor and nurses; Silverio is on a bus that gets flooded. He swims through the low water to his home, a set seemingly isolated in the desert, and a disturbing moment of Silverio with his feet nailed to the floor on stage during a public event.
Then the Bardo trailer goes dark with ominously cloudy images of a mountain of bodies, highlighted by a silhouetted long shot of Silverio standing on the top of them. Another startlingly intense flash of a scene follows involving a city street with people collapsing into unconsciousness onto the sidewalk as Silverio walks through them.
“Experience a state of mind,” we are told as the trailer’s stream-of-conscious flow continues with dancing girls dressed in pink cavorting, travelers in an airport walking in sync, Silverio being laughed at on a television talk show, dancing in a club, hordes of people walking across the desert with a helicopter above, Silverio and his family walking to the beach in a cove as the sun sets in the distance, and an emotional moment with Silverio and his father because of course this troubled soul has daddy issues.
With two last shots, the first of Silverio on the bus again, before the fish water bag broke, and the imagery of a city at night as seen from the back of the advancing bus, the Bardo trailer concludes. Whatever the fate of the response to the film, the cinematography of Darius Khondji will definitely be hailed, as evidenced by the abundance of amazing visuals throughout the trailer.
Bardo’s Has Powerful Pedigree, But Will its Surrealness Succeed?
Director of Photography Khondji is a name more movie-goers should know as his stunning camera work has graced the films of such acclaimed filmmakers as David Fincher, Woody Allen, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Gus Van Sant, Roman Polanski, Wong Kar-wai, Bong Joon-ho, Nicolas Winding Refn, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Jonathan Glazer, Pablo Larraín, the Safdie brothers, and James Gray to name over a dozen.
While Iñárritu’s seventh film, Bardo, attempts to impactfully illustrate a line spoken by Silverio, “life is nothing but a series of senseless events and idiotic images” (reminiscent of Shakespeare’s “Life…is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing”), the trailer implies something towards sorting out this imagery into something resembling meaning.
From its mixed buzz (51% on Rotten Tomatoes), it will be seen if Bardo succeeds in making meaning out of its random chaos. Still, at least curious movie-goers can be assured that they’re getting a visual feast as displayed by the pedigree and power present in this less than two and half minute trailer.
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