Bardo is a head-scratcher of an annoyance of a personal film that I didn’t get for long swaths and resented having to sit through that somehow, some way, comes together in the final thirty minutes of understanding so that I could at least appreciate and kind of respect it in a way as an abstraction of a film. And if that long run-on sentence doesn’t personify the frustrating trip of watching this film, I don’t know what does.

On paper, the film is about a Mexican émigré filmmaker who has lived in Los Angeles for the past twenty years. He is returning to Mexico to receive a journalism award from his peers. It deals with his struggle as a famous Mexican-American artist… what that means to him, how he feels about his adopted nation, how he feels about him homeland.

But a strictly textual, objective description of the plot ignores how wandering, meandering, and post-logic this film is. It begins with a flight of fancy and descends into a series of dream logic scenes stuffed with fanciful, magical realism and nightmare images. And even when it snaps back to something resembling reality, it remains for a full two and a half hours unmoored from traditional notions of logic.

For instance, in a perfect normal scenes, people will have a conversation where one of them suddenly stops talking and speaks only in voice-over. But then, suddenly, the other person gets annoyed and demands he speak with his mouth again. What does this mean? Does it mean anything or is it a self-indulgent filmmaker just being a weirdo?

Eventually it begins to become clear that many of the themes of this movie involve what it means to be a successful and wealthy Mexican immigrant to the US and what he thinks of returning to his homeland. About a Mexican struggling with the brutal history of his nation and what socio-economic status means to the culture and how he relates to the poor and desperate people of his homeland.

Once some of this cryptic dream bullshit starts to coalesce around the notion of a Mexican struggling with the nature and history of Mexico, I regained some interest in the film. At least it’s about something and these vague flights of fancy aren’t just nonsense to put on screen. As someone who doesn’t have any great understanding of Mexican culture or history, I can only appreciate this academically… I’m sure there’s a great ocean of meaning, importance and personal anxiety for people steeped in the culture. And I think it’s wonderful such a personal film about Mexican identity gets an international – and Netflix – release. It’s so rare that I – as an American – see any version of Mexico that doesn’t involve corrupt federales, drug cartels, illegal immigrants, and banditos. He gave that to me in Amores Perros and now he’s talking directly about it here.

But I still had to sit through a lot of utter bullshit to get to that realization… and then, even struggling past that, to the final thirty minutes where things snap into (hazy) focus. I was building a real resentment for this film until one event occurs that suddenly makes things that made no sense start making sense. And then I could look back to the hurdle of watching this film with a fresh set of eyes and understanding. And I can’t even argue that Iñárritu owed it to his audience to be more clear what the hell was going on since that would have robbed him of his magician’s reveal.

What a frustrating film to endure only to wind up on the other side appreciating. Appreciating… but I can’t go so far as say enjoying. It’s certainly an artistic, visually arresting, sometimes disturbing, sometimes annoyingly vague, often creeping experience. I can’t say if I recommend it or not. It definitely coalesces into something interesting that would reward a second viewing… but I’m not sure I’d ever want to do that.

Score: 72