Bardo (2022)
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Bardo Movie Review
Bardo is a 2022 Mexican drama film directed by Alejandro Inarritu and starring Daniel Gimenez Cacho. It is one of the director’s worst movies.
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“I am fine. I’m just sad! And that’s okay,
feeling sad is good for you sometimes“
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A renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker returns home and works through an existential crisis as he grapples with his identity, familial relationships and the folly of his memories. The only reason why I am giving this movie two stars instead of one is for its themes. The concept is actually a quality one as the director grapples not just with his national identity crisis but also with how his work is perceived by others and his relationship with his parents. Though odd, the scene with his father was quite touching and beautiful. It’s a shame that that wasn’t the focus of this entire film.
The problem here is that the execution is atrocious. We get it, Inarritu. You are worried that people find your work to be pretentious garbage. And how do you deal with this? By making what is another pretentious garbage. Everybody would tell you that this is not healthy. The existence of this movie just proved to me that I wasn’t wrong to say that ‘The Revenant’ was horrible and that ‘Birdman’ is one of the worst Best Picture winners of this century. This is his first Mexican movie since ‘Amores perros’, but gone are the days of that movie, the only one from his filmography that I genuinely loved.
Daniel Gimenez Cacho is good in the main role and some scenes like those moments with the parents are quite strong. However, the vast majority of Bardo is composed of pseudo-intellectual babbling sprinkled with a healthy dose of strange artsy bullshit. The baby sequences were grotesque and pointless. The metaphors in these odd and haunting scenes were too obvious and he should have just made a straightforward movie that explores all these themes head-on instead of losing himself or his ideas in this awfully unappealing ridiculousness.
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Bardo is reminiscent of the worst movies from Fellini, those that are both overlong and self-aggrandizing. If anyone ever doubted that Inarritu was full of himself, they should just watch this movie and be reminded of that. He literally admitted to the whole world with Bardo that he not only thinks he is an incredible filmmaker, but that we should all be thankful to be experiencing his greatness. No, thank you. I find you and your work insufferable and finally the critics agree with me.
On paper, Inarritu’s Bardo deals with some very interesting themes. But in execution, it is quite atrocious in spite of a couple of potent sequences. I was never in doubt about this director’s huge ego, but this movie finally proves to the whole world what he thinks of himself, which is to say that he thinks he is brilliant and that we should all be grateful to have him. No, thank you. I do not find you to be brilliant. I find you to be insufferably conceited and annoying. You had the option to deal with your critics in a healthy way here, but you only doubled down on the criticism of your work being pretentious garbage by making what is another hopelessly pretentious garbage.
My Rating – 2
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