'Bardo': Iñárritu looks at his artist's navel

“I will make a film about the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make”, thought Federico Fellini before the mental and creative jam of his eighth feature film.

Shortly before, or long before, because the quagmire he had reached was difficult to uncover, he seemed convinced that he wanted to make a film about the tortuous, changing and fluid labyrinth of memories, dreams and sensations;

a tangle of everyday life, memory, imagination, feelings;

of events that happened a long time before and that coexist with others that are happening, that are confused between nostalgia and presentiment in an immobile and amalgamated time, so as not to know who you are or who you were or where your life is going.

However, he did not know how to do all that.

Finally he got out

a masterpiece about the creative self and the lived self.

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Alejandro G. Iñárritu: "To emigrate is to die a little"

The intentions of Alejandro González Iñárritu with

which arrives on Netflix after its premiere last September at the Venice festival, are in the same vein as those of the Italian director.

The influence of the legendary title on subsequent filmmakers has been as enormous as the ego of Fellini himself and those who came after him: Bob Fosse, in

(1979);

Woody Allen, in

(1980);

and Pedro Almodóvar, in

(2019).

As Fellini himself said: "What a monstrous presumption to believe that others can enjoy the sordid catalog of your mistakes!".

And yet, the four of them ended up bequeathing portentous works.

They achieved what Iñárritu has not achieved with

transcend.

They made their world, their fears and their triumphs, their reflections and their nightmares, their dreams and their style, their ideas and their lack of certainties, fascinating to others.

The four looked at themselves, within, to settle accounts.

Iñárritu seems to have only looked at his navel with a pompous film filmed almost at all times in an apparently spectacular wide angle by another artist, this one in the image, Darius Khondji.

A monumental introspection that, more than a reckoning with himself, seems so with others.

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"You couldn't with your fucking ego and you got into the movie, you bastard!" an enemy journalist snapped at the protagonist, a prestigious documentary creator, Iñárritu's

played by Daniel Giménez Cacho, who had his haircut done. own director of

so that there is no doubt, or perhaps to further polish his own narcissism.

With an onirism that rarely crosses and almost always tires, Iñárritu, who has cut his work from the three hours of the version presented in Venice to two hours and 40 minutes from now, appears self-satisfied, prim, indulgent with himself bombproof (he complains about people being overexposed while making this film!), and pontificating against everything from Hernán Cortés to contemporary violence in Mexico.

Only the reflection on age in the conversation with his deceased father, and the farewell to the son he decided not to live, transfer his world to the audience.

While,

Some of the critics have been fanning Iñárritu for some time, perhaps since

which was a magnificent film, mainly because of its excessiveness, which is something that, by the way, Fellini was also accused of in his day.

With the deepest respect, this critic found the disagreements of many of his professional colleagues very unfair with, for example,

outstanding Oscar winner in 2015, with his love to the theater, to creation, to poetry and meaningful oneirism, in which there were already various nuances around the universe of the artist born in

Excessiveness, grandiloquence and narcissism can end up coming together in vast works of art, with a sense of the logic of creation within their lack of personal tact, that transcend from the purely individual, from the ego, even from the navel, to the interior of the receivers, of the spectators who hear and see a parable about oneself that ends up moving the rest.

But

is simply indefensible.

Bard

Direction:

Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Performers:

Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Iker Sánchez Solano.

Genre:

autofiction.

Mexico, 2022.

Platform:

Netflix.

Duration:

159 minutes.

Premiere: December 16.

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