Maybe someone can enlighten me as to what Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is actually trying to say with his officially released Venezia statement on “Bardo”:
A few years ago, I suddenly realised the road ahead of me was much shorter than the one I had left behind. Inevitably, I started to explore it backwards and inwards. Both paths are elusive and labyrinthine. Time and space enmesh. The narrative that makes up ‘our life’ is no more than a false mirage constructed of events experienced subjectively by our limited nervous system. Memory lacks truth. It only possesses emotional conviction. It is the truth in that emotion that I set out to search for in the enormous drawer of chimeras I have been carrying. I must warn you beforehand: I have found no absolute truths. Only a journey between reality and imagination. A dream. Dreams, as cinema, are real but not truthful. In both, time is liquid. BARDO is the chronicle of that journey between those two illusions whose borders are indecipherable.
The kicker is that despite his pretentious world jumble, he still has the audacity to call it a “comedy.”
On Monday night, Netflix screened 15 minutes of “Bardo” for a few Oscar pundits. One of them was puzzled by the enigmatic nature of what he saw on-screen, mentioning that he “wasn’t really sure what to make of it.”
I’m still not entirely sure what Inarritu’s 3-hour movie is about. We’ll find out in a little less than two weeks from now when “Bardo” has its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 1st.