This article appeared in the November 23, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2022)
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest feature, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, opens with a POV shot. The camera embarks on a running head start, leaps into the air, and floats for a few moments before returning to terra firma. If the sequence captures the emotional state of Iñárritu’s thinly veiled alter ego, Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho)—a man so disconnected from his professional life that he’s barely present even when his feet are planted squarely on the ground—it also, almost knowingly, offers Iñárritu’s critics a cheeky metaphor to lob against the film. Bardo is the kind of smugly self-aware work that believes it’s