Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths       3 stars

This film by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, with its long title is a very ambitious project in scope as well as being quite long at 159 minutes. It has some basis on his own life, which is a departure from his earlier award-winning films including Birdman and The Revenant. The main character, named Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a renowned activist and filmmaker of documentaries from Mexico, who is about to accept an award in Los Angeles for his latest film. He has a troubled relationship with his family including his wife, grown daughter and teenage son. And he is haunted by the loss of an infant son years earlier, who in the film didn’t want to be born, preferring to stay in the womb. Yes, you read that right! Much of the film deviates from reality, taking on a surrealistic tone such as when Mexican soldiers from The Mexican War appear pretending to be fighting, a commuter train suddenly flooding with water or with Silverio meeting Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortéz on top of a hill of human flesh. It’s all meant to show how Silverio is wracked with guilt. His time is split between two worlds, that of America where he is praised for his films and that of Mexico where he is from. Silverio both loves the beauty of Mexico and its people and hates it for its poverty and corruption. There are some people, including some of his own family, that despise him for this duality of his life. The film has some very artistic merits to it and has some masterfully done cinematography, especially when the camera does extremely long continuous takes gradually transitioning location and mood. The movie is grand in scale and Iñárritu has a lot to say, but it is probably a bit much for most audiences to take in. By the end of it I felt exhausted.