Guillermo del Toro surprised by reactions to Alejandro Iñárritu’s ‘Bardo’
Guillermo del Toro has come to the defence of his fellow Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu and his most recent film Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. The film has received a fair amount of unfavourable criticism since it aired at the Venice Film Festival at the beginning of September.
“The movie is undeniably one of the most powerful things I’ve seen in terms of cinema, pure cinema,” del Toro said during a Bardo Q&A session at the Los Angeles Academy Museum last week (via IndieWire). “To anyone that is confused about the plot and what it is about, my condolences. The fact is the movie’s called ‘Bardo,’ which means limbo, and it starts with a guy that tries to fly, but the path weighs him down and ends with him finally flying, and they don’t fucking get it? I’m amazed.”
He added: “What is very hard to explain is that everybody here, everybody on the screens, it’s extremely hard to explain how one of the aspects that has been the least [talked-about] of this movie is the cinema of it, and I find it absolutely flabbergasting.”
Bardo centres on a journalist/documentary maker who travels to his home country of Mexico and begins having an existential crisis and a series of hallucinatory visions. Daniel Gimenez Cacho and Griselda Sicilliani star in Iñárritu’s first film to be shot entirely in Mexico since 2000 with Amores perros.
Continuing his attack on the misunderstanding of the film, del Toro added, “Seeing a Van Gogh and asking for an opinion, and the opinion is, ‘Well, it’s about some flowers in a pot.’ The flowers are OK, the pot is nice, but nobody talks about the brushstrokes, the colours, the thickness of the paint, and the colour palette. It’s astounding to me. Everybody here did an incredible job at what they did. Every single shot and every single thing is one of the highest states and the hardest thing to pull off in cinema. Almost every shot.” Iñárritu then quipped, “You should write the review.“
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