"Bones and All" and "Bardo"

Neither Luca Guadagnino nor Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu's latest films have gotten much attention this season, despite both films being pretty strong.


I like "Bones and All" a bit more, a story about two vagrant teenagers in the early 1980s who bum around the U.S. and fall in love. Both of them are "eaters," or cannibals, a metaphor for a slew of personal troubles that brand them as outsiders. Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) is abandoned by her father Frank (André Holland) in Maryland after she loses control and mutilates a girl's finger at a sleepover. She decides to track down her mother Janelle (Chloë Sevigny), who abandoned her at birth. Maren meets a sinister eater named Sully (Mark Rylance), who starts stalking her. Then she meets and starts traveling with Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a troubled eater from Kentucky.


The extended road trip through the unglamorous parts of America reminds me of "American Honey" and "Nomadland," full of people and places on the fringes. Maren and Lee are constantly committing petty crimes to get by, constantly dodging the specters of violence, and each trying to outrun their pasts in their own way. Because it's Guadagnino, the young stars still look gorgeous in their perpetual dishevelment. They meet other eaters played by Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green, who seem to enjoy looking sketchy and unwashed. "Bones and All" is a very violent film, with people constantly being attacked and consumed. Horror movie fans should have no complaints about the quantity of blood. However, it is also a very tender film that is unabashedly romantic.


The depiction of cannibalism here fascinates me. There's a long tradition of Italian cannibal films, with cannibalism often standing in for fascism or exploitation or some other social malaise. In "Bones and All," Maren and Lee's cannibalism is an inherited trait, a legacy of violence and destruction that makes their existence difficult. The worldbuilding is all done through Maren's interactions with other eaters, who are very few and tend to either become self-destructive, or the very worst kind of predators. When Maren comes across a man who is an eater by choice, who doesn't have the same urges that she does, she's repulsed. With the unusual treatment of this material, and the very high caliber of actors - Sevigny in her single scene is amazing - it's inevitable that this will become a cult classic. And for the right audience, this one is a heartbreaker too.


"Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths" is a much harder, weirder nut to crack. Fifteen years ago, I used to think that Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu was the boring one, next to Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron. He's definitely proved me wrong. "Bardo" is about a Mexican journalist and filmmaker named Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) who has lived in Los Angeles for twenty years. He's about to receive a prestigious award and is having very mixed feelings about it, especially involving his complicated relationship to Mexico.


Maybe Gama or Iñárritu have been watching too many Frederico Fellini movies. The film starts with the image of a man's shadow leaping and flying through the empty desert. Then there's a scene of Silverio at the birth of his son Mateo, who refuses life, and decides to go back into his mother, Lucía (Griselda Siciliani). We learn later on that Mateo died, a few hours after birth. Silverio meets with an ambassador at a famous historical site, and imagines the bygone battle raging around them during their talk. He is invited to appear on a talk show, where he is unable to speak, and is subsequently humiliated. But it turns out that this didn't happen, because Gama ditched the appearance at the last minute. Gama's dreams, memories, and fantasies are getting mixed up with his actual life.


"Bardo" is one of those massively ambitious, semi autobiographical narratives that seems to want to put the director's entire psyche onscreen for our perusal. This results in some fabulous, surreal fantasy sequences that are a lot of fun, like a city bus suddenly becoming flooded, or Gama reconciling with his deceased father in a restroom, or an encounter with the conquistador Hernán Cortés. There are some beautifully orchestrated long takes, crammed full of carefully choreographed actors, often playing with multiple layers of reality. "Bardo" recalls "Birdman" more than anything, but with a far more personal story, taking its themes and many characters directly from Iñárritu's own life.


It's an impressive cinematic undertaking, but I've seen this story before, told far better by more innovative and daring filmmakers. I admire Iñárritu's ambitions, and he's very self-aware about what he's doing - there's an entire character devoted to vicious self-critique - but pointing out his own flaws doesn't mean they're not still there. I value Iñárritu's POV, especially his relationship with Mexico and his guilt over leaving it, but the film is so exhausting that it's not very accessible, and I doubt I'll return to it any time soon.


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