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Bardo Might Be Too Mexican For You
This movie is not for everybody
Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu (AGI) has a new movie out. It is called , and it's not your typical film.
For starters, it is a semi-autobiographical story. In it, he created an alter ego, Silverio Gama (played by the consistently excellent Daniel Gimenez Cacho), a journalist and documentary maker who is back in Mexico for a visit after enjoying wild success abroad. Ring a bell?
The movie begins with what must be one of the most bizarre scenes I have ever seen in a film: Silverio's wife gives birth to a baby who decides he doesn't really want to be born, given the shitty state of the world and all that jazz. As a result, the doctor pops him back into his mother as if it were just another Tuesday.
"What's the baby going to eat now?" Silverio asks his wife.
"Me…and you," she responds.
The scene, of course, carries deeper meaning once you learn this is a reference to the fact that, in 1996, the filmmaker's second child died just a few days after being born.
I watched the film in an almost empty Mexican movie theater — there were only 5 of us — and we all laughed our asses off when that scene played out. Still, I imagine movie audiences around…
