OPINION | Letter to Alejandro González Iñárritu regarding the departure of “Bardo”

Bard: False Chronicle of a Few Truths (2022).

Daniel Giménez Cacho as Silverio.

Courtesy: Netflix

Editor's note:

Wendy Guerra is a French-Cuban writer and contributor to CNN en Español.

Her articles have appeared in media around the world, such as El País, The New York Times, the Miami Herald, El Mundo and La Vanguardia.

Among her most outstanding literary works are "Underwear" (2007), "I was never the first lady" (2008), "Posing naked in Havana" (2010) and "Everyone leaves" (2014).

Her work has been published in 23 languages.

The comments expressed in this column belong exclusively to the author.

See more at cnne.com/opinion

(CNN Spanish) --

My dear Alexander:

I don't want to wake you up, it's already midnight here, but in Europe it's barely dawn.

I am writing to you after having seen

.

I am fascinated by your new film.

He possesses one of the great gifts of

: taking the Latin American imaginary to the universal plane, taking out the glass of water of the spirits, hidden under the bed and elevating it to the world of

, to that choral complicity that narrates, alludes to It hurts, but also represents us.

The structure reminds me of

, we can start reading it from any dramatic corner.

Packages of land are distributed to the spectator and the history of the American continent is contained in them.

The important thing is that from here begins what you call a watershed.

has projected onto the white plane a much-needed aesthetic and ethical ideological debate.

Closing your eyes to that is, at the very least, an act of irresponsibility and cowardice.

Courtesy: Netflix

Having already gone beyond the concept

, updated by Francis Fukuyama after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and in the absence of true leaders, since those who govern today are, for the most part, second voices, it appears, as if out of nowhere, your

.

This character amplifies his inner demons during the plot and, with great beauty, distributes the disorder generated by his social immolation, incinerates himself and leads his family adrift, in a kamikaze act of delivery, showing the weaknesses, achievements and miseries of the intellectual melodrama of the Latin American left.

Silverio Gama has managed to obtain the highest awards treasured by a creator in the 21st century, knowing that the only thing left to do is put everything he has won at risk to start over, exchanging the exposure of his intimacy for a bittersweet cultural debate in the midst of a crisis unprecedented systemic

Thus begins this journey of no return.

Although Jaques Derrida deals with disputing and moving the floor to all classical oppositions, posing: "Circularity is historicity: that is, the gravity of an already existing that weighs and gives its place, its center, to the question of being that has always begun to invoke us”, the film proposes a tour of classic sequences where at the end of each one of them, the set is broken and also the hero in pieces, thus provoking the historical review of each shot from the monumentality of our visual balconies.

Courtesy: Netflix

Silverio uses the files like someone who picks up his running shoes to get lost in the woods.

That's what the canons are for, to revisit them, dilute them and return to them.

I have read reviews of the movie.

I feel that some go beyond the film, trying to prevent the Latin American world from expressing itself in a monumental way, restricting the right to portray our universe, our problems and our endemic pains with the monumentality that distinguishes us.

The exuberance of Alejo Carpentier in

, the sharp words of Roberto Bolaño, the accurate cartography of Octavio Paz's thought and the powerful shadow of death in Juan Rulfo built the voice of our continent.

At this point, we do not have to ask for permission or forgiveness, for and to narrate and argue, in our style.

And it is that, from the essential meaning of a pre-Columbian pyramid or from the thick landscapes of Latin American culture, we are the canon and that is

's bet .

Once again, underestimation and arrogance hide behind the aesthetic goal, trying to decide what we can or cannot embody, taking into account our cultural heritage.

I thought that only totalitarian societies prohibited a classical dancer from interpreting and dressing Othello or Carmen with the taste of our hips or the rhythm of the drum in the waist.

I thought it was only in a dictatorship where it is sacrilegious to combine the study of Rachmaninoff with the marrow of a corner guaguancó, but I was wrong, dear Alejandro.

Totalitarianism and double standards are poachers who live in the soul of any society, staying in unexpected places, waiting for the moment to throw their dagger at the heart of what is legitimate.

I think it's time to create a new model of criticism, I don't feel recognized in an outdated criticism, disconnected from the root, that doesn't understand who we are, where we come from and where we who were born in

are going .

We must deconstruct or remove the genres, or at least shake these institutions with ideas, otherwise we will go down in history gagged, disguised with a neocolonial filter that is not very credible.

On an aesthetic level, I felt a powerful immersion in the visual arts, an intervention in the work of Frida Kahlo in the sequence of the inward birth of the baby and that infinite umbilical cord that the protagonist tries, without luck, to cut.

William Kentridge, in the mighty march of the emigrants;

José Bedia, in the flying man that transcends the desert;

Giorgio de Chirico, in the dilated architecture in the shadows;

Marina Abramovic, also in the sequence of the umbilical cord, of the body passed out on the floor of the woman that nobody seems to notice in the crowded Mexico City, and in the treatment of the sensuality of the bodies throughout the film;

Spencer Tunic and the mass photos of him in urban spaces;

Sandra Ramos, with her rooms overflowing with sand, and of course, the degradations in the textures and the delirium of the ochres,

This film, like emerging art, proposes to cordon off areas of society and analyze it as a living laboratory in movement, in order to later release it, generating everything that great works bring, restlessness, fear of change over experimentation.

Back home, reviewing the titles of your filmography, I wonder:

What does an artist of your ability have to narrate after four Oscars?

Rest on your laurels, not remove the dead earth or question the universe that surrounds us, not even your own existence?

Today begins a long road.

We are in the prehistory of

, a debate that will transcend us by putting before us the fable and its paradigm. The dressed king or the naked king?

For those of us who want a better continent, the king goes naked.

We have to accept it, and as you always told us in the writers' room, "this is black bread, because everyone likes white bread, anyone eats refined bread".

An infinite hug.

your Wendy

PS: Eliseo Alberto (Lichi) says that up there they saw

and everyone loved it.