Give Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Birdman) a camera and the freedom to create and great things are bound to come from the visionary director.
Based on the trailer that dropped Thursday (September 22), such may be the case once again with Iñárritu’s latest opus, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. The film follows Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles who returns to his homeland where he is pushed to an “existential limit.”
As the description from Netflix reads, “the folly of [Silverio’s] memories and fears have decided to pierce through the present, filling his everyday life with a sense of bewilderment and wonder. With both emotion and abundant laughter, Silverio grapples with universal yet intimate questions about identity, success, mortality, the history of Mexico, and the deeply emotional familial bonds he shares with his wife and children. Indeed, what it means to be human in these very peculiar times.”
The challenging themes behind Bardo sound about right for Iñárritu, who also co-wrote the film with Oscar-winning Argentine screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone (Birdman). If you’re looking for concrete answers about the narrative from the film’s first trailer, you’ll likely come out of it with more questions.
Set to The Beatles’ song “I Am the Walrus” from their 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour, the dialogue-less Bardo trailer features a series of beautiful images from Oscar-nominated cinematographer Darius Khondji (Evita), who the Mexican filmmaker has never worked with before. All his prior films have either been shot by Rodrigo Prieto (Babel) or Emmanuel Lubezki (The Revenant).
Some of the picturesque scenes in the Bardo trailer include a man jumping from a tower wrapped in a Mexican flag, a roofless house flooded with water, Silverio getting his feet nailed to a stage, and another scene where he’s climbing up a large hill made up of (dead?) human bodies. There’s a lot to unpack from the preview, but we’re brimming with excitement at the possibilities.
Bardo is scheduled to be released in theaters on November 18, 2022. It will start streaming on Netflix on December 16, 2022.