by Gill Pringle
An epic and surreal dramedy, Bardo follows Iñárritu’s alter-ego Silverio, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, who, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to his native country, unaware that this simple trip will push him to an existential crisis.
It’s a journey that the Mexican director has personally navigated countless times in the two decades since he moved to the U.S. with his wife and children.
Likewise, his perception of success has also altered since achieving global recognition with his 2000 international sensation, Amores Perros, going on to receive further acclaim with his films 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and The Revenant.
“Successful to me. . . you don’t have to be an Oscar winner,” suggests Iñárritu who, in 2015, became the first Mexican to win three Oscars when he picked up Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director for Birdman. Just a year later, he would bring home Oscar again for The Revenant.
“We are told since we were kids, that success is a place to arrive that will change the whole thing and solve your problems. I have found that, when you are older, you find that success, and in a way, it is like a mirage. You run, run, run! There’s water there! And then you arrive and there’s no water, so it’s like smoke,” says the director when we meet in Los Angeles.
“No matter how successful you are, I think success is an interior peace of mind, that peace [you find] when you don’t wish any more success. I think that’s success – when you don’t need to be looking for it anymore. That’s the reflection that I have personally arrived at.
“And that’s how the character I was trying to portray is – he’s just realising that it has been a lie to be successful. And if you are miserable, no matter how successful or how many Oscars you have, or whatever recognitions you have in your world, you will still be the same – and we don’t teach that to kids.
“I think that it’s that kind of relation with success that I wanted to question: What is success? And I think it’s important – and I know people will say ‘Oh these guys complain about…’ But it’s not complaining, it’s just a reality because an Oscar does not give you happiness.
“What makes me personally happy is much more about the things that are deeper and more important than an Oscar,” he says.
While he’s directed the likes of Benicio del Toro, Naomi Watts, Javier Bardem, Tom Hardy, Emma Stone and Michael Keaton, Iñárritu did not want the spectre of celebrity clouding this deeply personal story.
His first film to be shot in Mexico in the 22 years since Amores Perros, he cast Mexican actor Daniel Gimenez Cacho as his alter-ego Silverio Gama, with Argentinian actress Griselda Siciliana playing his wife Lucia, and Iker Solano and Ximena Lamadrid as their son and daughter.
With both pathos and laughter, Silverio grapples with universal, yet intimate questions about identity, success, mortality, the history of Mexico and the emotional familial bonds he shares with his family. Indeed, what it means to be human in these very peculiar times.
Forced to confront his own past in making Bardo, Iñárritu reflects, “l’m gonna turn 60 years old soon, so I think there’s a moment where you say: I think there’s a little baggage. There’s a lot of things I detect culturally and some elements emotionally. I do not remember my childhood unfortunately. I have a block. I have three pictures of me when I was a kid, that’s it. For some reason, I don’t have access to it,” he reveals, not without some regret.
“I would have loved to have made a foundation of who I am, if I had access to my childhood – but I don’t. And probably only this last 20 to 25 years could possibly enlighten me or help me to know how I became what I became or how I got here.
“So, this was my axis of plain emotion to revise that – putting together those things. I went into that very deeply. It was an introspection inward. The fabric of this film is made of that; these emotions, feelings, fears, regrets and things that I have in mind, or things that I have experienced.
“Once I got that, it took me four years to put things on the table. Things that were intimate and personal; things that were from my personal memory and from the collective memory of my country – events that have changed us as Mexicans, recent ones from the past and things that could happen in the future – such as Amazon buying Baja California!” he laughs referring to an hilarious and not entirely unbelievable plot point.
Putting all of his collective experience into a melting pot, he says, “Once it was all there, I got to fictionalise. I was not interested in a biography, because my biography will be the most boring biography ever – because I don’t believe in biographies, I think they are lies. They are hypocrisies because we cannot claim that they happened that way; it’s the way I remember.
“In this way, I am trying to find a higher truth as a way to reveal what reality is hiding, so I fictionalised everything to understand it better. And then it was not me anymore. I created an alter ego character in a way for me to really put all those things through Silverio Gama, and I always saw him as Silverio Gama. I never was thinking, ‘Oh, this is me’,” he says.
With so much of Bardo told through the lens of his own experience, Iñárritu admits that it was a somewhat meta experience, also incorporating experiences of his wife, Maria.
“We lived [in the US] for almost 14 years with the O1 visa, and I have to renew the O1 visa every six months when I would have to go to Tijuana to renew it. And when we were crossing the border with the kids going to Tijuana and when we were coming back, the lines were infinite and we were in this incredible heat; the kids being so young then, and I’d be going to the Border Guard guys, ‘Hey, sorry guys. They said two hours and we have two kids…’ and, without even seeing you, they’d send you back to your car,” he recalls.
To make matters worse, a reckless driving conviction in Memphis, Tennessee from 2002 would also haunt him for years. “For 14 years, every time I arrived at the airport, they send me to secondary revision for one hour. So, every time we arrived in LA, I said to my family, ‘okay, I see you later!’ For 14 years!
“Because after September 11, the rules changed, so I was viewed as super suspicious. I was locked with 60 people, whether we were suspicious or not. And I was there every time and sometimes the people were nice, and even they would say ‘Hey, Mr. Gonzales, how are you? We’re working on the record, sorry man’. And other times there were guys that were interrogating me like, ‘what do you do here?’
“But this precise thing in the film actually happened to my wife four years ago,” he says referring to a specific airport scene in Bardo.
“She arrived home crying, and she was treated like shit with the [immigration] paper making the definition of who you are, where you belong, and just the abuse of power.”
Making Bardot hopefully proved cathartic as well as offering a salve to the countless millions of immigrants who have left their homes and struggled to acclimate to a new country.
“There’s an endless stream of dreams that unite me with the journeys of millions of migrants around the world. Beyond the adventure of making this film, in those of us who have experienced this unexplainable state, I share the ungraspable feeling of dislocation with millions of people and compatriots,” he offers.
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is streaming now
