Bad Education
With an elated heart and a lightened spirit, I have just deleted the first 500 words of my review and started over. I was trying to describe the plot of “Bad Education.” It was quicksand, and I was going under fast. You and I have less than 1,000 words to share about this interesting movie and that would take half of them; moreover, if by some miracle I could make it clear, I would only spoil your enjoyment.
This is a movie we are supposed to walk around in. It starts in the present with a story about the past, presents that story as a film within a film, then if I’m not mistaken there’s a paradoxical moment when the two categories leak into each other. It’s like “Citizen Kane,” where one character’s memories curiously contain another’s.
So there are 153 words right there; my guess is you’re thinking hell with it just tell us what it’s about and whether it’s any good. Your instincts are sound. Pedro Almodovar’s new movie is like an ingenious toy that is fun to look at until you take it apart to see how it works, then it never works again. While you’re watching it you don’t realize how confused you are because either from moment to moment or when it doesn’t make sense you’re distracted by sex. Life is like that.
The story which I will not tell involves Enrique (Fele Martinez), who becomes a young film director who one day gets visited by Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernal). Ignacio has written a story he wants Enrique to read. Under ordinary circumstances Enrique wouldn’t be interested but he discovers his visitor is the Ignacio –the boy who was his first adolescent love back in school and that the story takes place in their school days and involves Ignacio being sexually abused by a priest at their school. Indeed he permitted the abuse in order to get Enrique out of some trouble: “I sold myself for the first time that night in the sacristy.”
That’s all of the story you will hear from me; but to fan your interest I will note Gael Garcia Bernal an actor turning out as versatile as Johnny Depp plays a drag queen in this movie so well that had he played Hephaistion Alexander would have stayed home in Macedonia while they opened an antique store antiquities being dirt cheap at time.
Almodovar loves melodrama so do I where lurid for me usually carries praise connotations The film within allows showing transgressive sexual behavior during Franco‘s fascist regime when illegal twice as exciting There enough sex earn NC-17 rating although not more than make even distantly pornographic You see hands heads moving its up figure out why?
In an Almodovar film, sex is always a foregone conclusion. It’s what his characters do. His films are not about sex; they’re about consequences and feelings. In “Bad Education,” straight and gay (and for that matter, transvestite and transsexual) are categories used by “real” people as well as “fictional” ones, who in turn use them as roles, disguises, strategies, deceits or simply ways to make a living.
I have no doubt in my mind that Almodovar screened Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” before making the movie and was fascinated with the idea of a man asking a woman to pretend to be the woman he loves without knowing she actually is the woman he loves whereupon she gives her performance in his life although it works the other way around in hers.
The Hitchcockian identity puzzle becomes even more labyrinthine in Almodovar’s story because Ignacio’s screenplay depicts a past which neither Ignacio nor Enrique remember exactly and moreover Enrique doesn’t think Ignacio looks much like Ignacio anymore though he loved him only 15 years ago. Zahara the drag queen begins to acquire her own separate identity then up comes the guilty priest with his version of events.
Almodovar wants to intrigue us and entertain us which he certainly does proving along the way that Gael Garcia Bernal has just as much screen presence as Antonio Banderas brought to earlier movies for Almodovar. Besides which he has also got Zara Maura kind of presence playing Zahara.
I am not sure whether or not Almodovar has any message at all; this movie is no attack on sexually abusive priests nor does it have anything whatsoever to say about homosexuality which for him is no more topic than heterosexuality is for Clint Eastwood.
It seems really more concerned with erotic role-playing: About roles we play ourselves; roles other people play themselves; roles imagined by us played by others imagined by us playing those roles involving our own selves etc., And if Almodovar is right some of our most exciting sexual experiences may take place entirely within minds belonging exclusively unto other persons.
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