In Between States

Bardo - Life Through Movies #13

Extremes. By getting to know them, I find balance.
Too much work leads to burnout, no surprises there. On the other hand, I recently tasted that too much contemplation can make me dip into madness. By experiencing those two extremes, I'm now more capable of integrating the correct amount of each for a more balanced, sustainable lifestyle.

This in between stages I'm more interested in lately, because it's where most of life happens.

It's one way to read Bardo, Alejandro Iñárritu's latest movie. The protagonist is in between states: torn between identities with his Mexican roots and his later life in the US, between its seeming current success and the need to do something different, between what he hopes and what he has, or had.

The title, Bardo, refers to the buddhist concept of "existence between death and rebirth". Even the movie itself dances between reality and surreality to a spectacular degree.

I find it remarkable that the movie never really chooses between all this. Not stemming from an indecisive nature but more as a way of accepting that life's path comes with this constant bumping between opposing states and our successful or unsuccessful balance of them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said it best:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

Besides ideas, it can be applied to stages and ways of life. For years, I thought that my ideal state of life was binary: I will grow a business until it runs completely by itself, and then I will focus, unpolluted by financial constraints, on creative endeavors.

It was the exact moment when I realized that a business is a changing thing and will never be truly perfect, that I allowed myself to start developing the creative side.

I realized it was a false dichotomy and didn't have to choose.
And that, in the end, is liberating.

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LOOK OUT FOR:

• The long, uninterrupted takes. Very difficult to pull off. The TV show and the dance at the party are such a treat to watch, but my favorite is the one at the Castillo de Chapultepec

• In the mini-wave of ~60 year-old directors I admire making their most personal, autobiographical film (Cuarón's Roma, Sorrentino's Hand of God) I find Bardo to be both the riskiest and most relatable one:

  • Riskiest because it doesn’t have a “center of gravity”, as he called it. It’s a meandering movie with a very loose structure

  • Most relatable because I’m Mexican. Although the themes are universal, I believe some of the nuances, from slang words to the mocking of the Niños Héroes myth to the social and political commentary, can only be fully grasped by Mexicans.

• Most of the movie is filmed with a slight fisheye lens that blurs the edges, coupled with the bright and defined colors, it has an expansive, larger-than-life feeling. The cinematographer is the amazing Darius Khondji.

• Loved the side of the soundtrack that has lots of trumpets, sounding like it’s mocking a martial band. Bryce Dessner from The National composed the other, more classical side

• ​​I met a cinematographer that briefly worked in the film as main camera operator and said Iñárritu is such a perfectionist that, after weeks of building the set for the first scene in the hospital, he decided the shade of color of the floor tiles didn’t look good and had them redo all of it

• Recently heard this podcast of Iñárritu with Rick Rubin. Such a joy hearing them talk and convey they’re just as human as us