Beauty is on display in Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, the latest from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Protagonist Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a man in crises—mid-life, existential, and so on—staggering through beautiful vista after beautiful vista in a surreal search for his own identity, something he has realized is missing only too late.There’s the beauty of life in Mexico City and broader Mexico, his motherland and the place that he left behind to pursue an affluent life and career. And there's the beauty of Los Angeles, the place that called him to leave and from which he now feels estranged. The metro floods with water, the people are collapsing in the streets. The cities we know so well are glitching! And it’s a sight to behold.
We sat down with Bardo production designer Eugenio Caballero—who previously helped capture Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexico City in Roma—about the majesty of Chapultepec Castle, helping great Mexican directors realize their own visions of their shared hometown, and the mysterious beauty of Baja California.
What is your own relationship with Mexico City?
I was born here. It is the city that I grew up in. And then I left for many years. I went to study in Europe. The film Roma brought me back to Mexico. I always had this deep connection with Mexico City, but was not here for many years. Somehow, I’m lucky, this movie also basically just happens in this city. It’s a reinterpretation of the city.
How’s that?
Well, it’s a dreamscape, where the old and historic and the new parts of the city are coinciding.
Such a collision is perhaps most on display in the scene at Chapultepec Castle, wherein the protagonist in the present gets swept up in the battle that happened there in 1847 between Mexico and the United States. Can you talk about shooting that?
It’s a very complex location, obviously, because it’s a historical landmark. It used to be the presidential house for many, many years. Chapultepec Castle has all of the layers that Mexico has, with the old European style at the base. After the revolution, one of the first things that happened was that architecture that was connected to the old regime was basically removed. The main objective of the revolutionaries was to remove the touch of the Europeans.
If you see the castle, it does have a lot of European architecture on it, as do a lot of these neighborhoods. But these buildings became open to young artists who would paint murals over that detail. That’s why murals exploded in Mexico—they are everywhere. All these great artists actually took the walls from the public buildings and painted these amazing murals, including Chapultepec. So you have, let’s say, the end of the 19th-century architecture and all these values, which were more tending to be conservative, and pro-European. And then you have all this fire of the revolution on the walls. It’s an amazing place to shoot. But it was super difficult—now it’s a museum. We created a choreography where we didn’t touch any wall or floor; we covered a lot of things with lookalike materials that actually protected the existing carpets and pieces of furniture. We had to make a full-scale replica of the tower, which was huge, in a parking lot in another part of the city near the airport.
Let’s talk about some of those other parts of the city. How did you decide where to shoot the scene where Silverio is walking in the street and all of the pedestrians around him begin collapsing?
Again, I wanted to choose a location with lots of layers. We chose a particular corner to use in the scene where he wanders the city because it had this nice conservative architecture—you have one of the big cathedrals, Pinacoteca de la Profesa en el Templo de San Felipe Neri. But this beautiful area is now almost all retail and Americanized stores and restaurants. If you notice, there’s a mix of vehicles from the last three or four decades. Through the eyes of Silverio, this is his city in all of the different times that he’s been there. His mind messes up a bit and, instead of seeing one time, he’s seeing the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and now—all times that he’s been in Mexico City.
You don’t shoot exclusively in Mexico City, however. Tell me about other locations that you used in Mexico.
The scenes of the migrant caravan were shot in San Luis Potosí, in the desert. And then we have our scenes where the protagonist is in limbo, which was shot in Baja California, in the middle of the desert. It’s a very well-protected area.
In the film, Amazon is making a move to buy Baja California. Why there?
I love Baja California—it’s one of my favorite regions in Mexico because the landscape is so amazing. It creates a parallel reality, you have these super rich mansions in Los Cabos. One of those is in the film, Silverio goes with his family to this big holiday house. And then you have beautiful beaches, and the scenery of the family taking the baby to the water at Playa Balandra [in Baja California Sur], which is one of the most beautiful beaches in Mexico. It has these really blue tones in the water and in the desert too because it’s where the desert meets the ocean. And because it’s a peninsula, it almost feels like an island—you are always surrounded by water. That contrast actually makes it very interesting. Very rich in itself. It seems that it’s a very dry area, in terms of, you know, I’m talking about spirit, but I found it extremely deep.
And then on to Los Angeles—what does the opposition between these two places mean?
Los Angeles and Mexico City do have a lot of similarities. Silverio feels comfortable in L.A. because he doesn’t belong, and that’s the problem with immigration. When he went away, he took an image from Mexico from the moment he left and then things changed while he was away. He has lots of regret. We filmed on the Los Angeles public transit, where we filled a car with water, which is completely misplaced and wrong. This is how he feels in Los Angeles.
