A number of commentators
observed in Pedro Almodóvar’s last movie — the eccentric, ambiguous,
essentially comic Talk to Her —
indications of some softening and mellowing, like some exotic melon, with an unwonted
sense of sweetness and sympathy. Although his work in fact often displays a
blatant overripeness, a fragrant decadence that the director at times
positively wallows in, that picture actually suggested a somewhat more
straightforward and serious approach to its characters and concomitantly, a
somewhat less contemptuous attitude towards its audience. It employed its
bizarre subjects and situations for a relatively humane (for Almodóvar at
least) treatment of its themes, an apparent movement in a new direction.
With his latest, naturally highly praised movie, Bad Education, the director continues
his fascination with a number of persistent ideas and images, suggesting that
his alleged maturation may have been a temporary readjustment in the service of
some unusual material. The new picture lacks the simple beauty of its
predecessor, which framed its story with two remarkable dance sequences, but
develops that film’s significant narrative complexity to a high level of
sophistication and apparently intentional confusion.
In a baldly obvious sequence near the end of the movie,
the director sends two of his characters to a theater featuring a film noir
festival, with a poster advertising Double
Indemnity. Almodóvar thus deliberately labels his own work, linking it with
those dark classics of greed, lust, and betrayal, which perennially enchant the
European imagination. The plot and situations that precede that moment,
however, never really demonstrate more than a perfunctory connection with the
movies he cites, making the allusions seem merely mechanical and even
pretentious.
In fact, the bright Spanish sunlight and the clashing
colors of the typical Almodóvar palette, so different from the traditional play
of black and white, tend to neutralize any sense of ominous passion and fatal
treachery, those standard items in the noir catalogue. Although the story
involves sex, blackmail, and murder, it also displays so much of the director’s
penchant for erotic comedy that it rarely achieves much in the way of genuine
emotional engagement. Too much of the movie seems trivial or even merely silly,
which hinders the development of the sort of tension that its purported
inspiration normally generates.
Bad Education substitutes a most self-consciously complicated narrative method for the usual
emotional complexity of film noir. It begins with a young man, an actor (Gael
Garcia Bernal) identifying himself as an old school chum named Ignacio, showing
up at the home of Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez), a movie director, hoping to
convince Enrique to adapt a story he has written and cast him in the film. The
picture then dramatizes part of the story, turning it into a movie in fact
starring Ignacio as a transvestite who attempts to seduce an old school friend,
a situation that will repeat itself in many variations throughout the film.
The movie then proceeds to move back and forth in time,
showing the two friends as children, classmates at school, and their sexual
victimization by a priest, Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho). Complicating
the narrative further, it turns out that Ignacio, who wants to be called Angel,
is actually Ignacio’s brother Juan, who forms a sexual and later, criminal
liaison with the same priest, now no longer a priest and now played by a
different actor (Lluis Homar); Angel also plays a woman named Zahara in the
film made from his story. The former priest evens shows up on the set and
introduces himself to the director as the villain of the movie Enrique is
directing.
The constant shifts in time periods and narrative modes,
the frequent fusion of text and film, account for a considerable amount of the
appeal of Bad Education. Its many,
sometimes comic confusions of identity, especially in the character of
Ignacio/Juan/Angel/Zahara, transform the relatively simple story of homoerotic
obsession into a palimpsest of character and action, a blurry text that
constantly reflects back on itself. Despite all the clever manipulation,
Almodóvar must resort to several paragraphs of prose at the end to wind up his
story, an odd, flat conclusion to the movie’s highly conscious complexity.
Almodóvar happily accepted the usually dreaded NC-17
rating for a film that despite its homosexual orientation seems no more
shocking than the average R flick at the megaplex. His fascination with
transvestites and transsexuals resurfaces in Bad Education, which allows him to turn Gael Garcia Bernal, who
starred in The Motorcycle Diaries,
into a disconcertingly attractive woman. In what must have been a difficult
role, Bernal must carry most of the film and to his credit, he manages quite
well, both in and out of drag, a sexual confusion that nicely typifies the
movie.
Bad Education (La Mala
Educación), starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Fele Martinez, Daniel Giménez
Cacho, Lluis Homar, Javier Cámara, Petra Martinez, Nacho Perez, Raúl Garcia
Forneiro, Francisco Boira, Juan Fernandez; written and directed by Pedro
Almodóvar. The Little Theatre.
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.
