Bad Education (2004)

Director / Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar  Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine  Music: Alberto Iglesias

Stars: Gael Garcia Bernal, Fele Martinez, Daniel Gimenez-Cacho

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A young film director is enticed by a script written by an old friend and based on their troubled boyhood experiences at a Catholic school. Autobiographically inspired tale from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar.

So personal is the material that forms the basis for his latest sumptuous melodrama that Pedro Almodóvar apparently worked on the script for Bad Education on and off for over a decade. It shows. Every scene, every line, every frame seems highly polished, beautifully wrought, artistic inspiration coupled with the perspiration of dedicated craft. In the middle of a golden period following All About My Mother and the Oscar-winning Talk to Her, Almodóvar’s filmmaking appears effortless; it’s somewhat reassuring to discover that he actually has to put in the hours to make it seem so.

Not that everyone will find something to love in this updated, technicolour film noir. Almodóvar still weaves intricate soap operatics within his defiantly provocative milieu – what would ‘una pelicula de Almodóvar’ be without at least one unrequited gay relationship and the odd fragile transvestite or two? In fact, Bad Education is practically a primer to the director’s work, here filtered through the twin churches of Catholicism and cinema – repression and expression – subjects he’s always keenly studied.

If arrogant young filmmaking prodigy Enrique Caded (Martinez) is a veiled self-portrait by Almodovar, it’s not a flattering one. Enrique barely tolerates the sudden appearance of childhood schoolmate and wannabe actor, Ignacio (Bernal) until he reads Ignacio’s script ‘The Visit’. It reads as a memoir of their mutual schoolboy crush, quashed by the passions of their teacher Father Manolo (Gimenez-Cacho), himself consumed with desire for the young Ignacio. Here the script projects a future fantasy where transvestite performer Zahara (Bernal again), picks up and seduces a man who turns out to be his friend Enrique and returns to blackmail the ageing priest for sexually abusing the young Ignacio.

Intrigued, Enrique agrees to make the film, but refuses to cast Ignacio (who demands to be called ‘Angel’) as Zahara. Their spat leads to a series of revelations, past identity switches and crimes of passion, which reverberate into the present.

Almodóvar controls the film-within-a-film, flashbacks and escalating melodrama almost nonchalantly, spinning playful pastiche into genuine emotional depths. Jose Luis Alcaine’s lustrous images and Alberto Iglesias’ foreboding score complement the story admirably. There are superb performance too, notably a piquant cameo from Talk to Her lead Javier Camara as a flighty transvestite, Daniel Gimenez-Cacho’s tortured priest and the fearless Bernal, somehow playing both femme fatale and enfant terrible at the same time. Lack of obviously sympathetic characters may make the film harder to love than Almodóvar’s other recent efforts but the results are no less thought provoking.

Almodóvar’s superb run of form continues. He may have swotted up on the tropes and traits of film noir but Bad Education passes his own personal tests and high standards with flying colours.