Now greater than ever, filmmakers are making movies about filmmaking: Steven Spielberg, Sam Mendes and Paolo Sorrentino have all been at it recently. No self-made quasi-biopic is more likely to be fairly as unusual — or as self-indulgent — as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s newest, a movie as huge in ambition as it’s nakedly pretentious in execution. In Buddhism, “bardo” describes the liminal state between loss of life and rebirth; on display screen, Bardo is the cinematic state of getting your cake and consuming it.

It’s a tough movie of which to get the measure. The plot, akin to it’s, considerations Silverio Gama (performed by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, whose salt-and-pepper beard and hair invitations a conspicuous comparability to Iñárritu himself), a famend Mexican filmmaker who makes an surprising journey to his hometown from his Los Angeles base in an effort to obtain a lifetime achievement award. The timing of the award appears to chime with an existential reckoning through which Silverio tries to familiarize yourself together with his marriage, kids, nationality, and grief over an obvious stillborn child.

There’s a simple midlife-crisis story right here, however — leaning into the identical playful continuity and eccentric humour of his Oscar-winning movie Birdman — Iñárritu retains actuality at arm’s size; the seams between scenes are perpetually phantasmagorically fuzzy, magical-realist flights of fancy at each flip. That throw-the-rulebook-out strategy might be as thrilling as it’s irritating. There may be some bravura filmmaking on present right here, epic in scope, however there’s an vacancy to a few of it too, so bonkers as to be stripped of all that means.

Bardo is, due to this fact, the very definition of a “blended bag”. Typically it’s bizarrely lovely, such because the serenely dreamlike opening sequence, which gives a chook’s-eye-view of an unseen determine making superhuman jumps throughout a Mexican panorama. Typically it’s grotesquely extreme and didactic, as when Silverio climbs a mountain of corpses, bluntly symbolic of Mexico’s bloody historical past. Typically it’s simply near-insufferable, such because the excruciating second through which Silverio begins to go down on his spouse, just for a CG child — an unwelcome recurring character — to rudely emerge from her vagina.

Bardo a minimum of seems to be spectacular, with cinematographer Darius Khondji discovering unusual magnificence in the whole lot from mass migration to a maternity ward. And amid the unrestrained silliness, there’s an earnest try and grapple with concepts of identification and self, particularly as an immigrant alienated in two cultures.

“Success has been my greatest failure,” Silverio says at one level (throughout a scene, by the way, through which his face has been transplanted onto the physique of a small boy — don’t ask). Like many traces on this script, it appears to be Iñárritu speaking about himself, directly introspective and self-important, a movie engaged in a dialogue with its personal director. Whether or not it’s a dialog you’re keen to hearken to will rely in your fortitude.