The Year 2004: Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)

Rick Olson of the superb Coosa Creek Cinema is back at Counting Down The Zeroes with this great review of Bad Education, his second submission to the project on the films of Pedro Almodovar, the other being Talk to Her. Bad Education opened the 57th Cannes Film Festival back in 2004 and became yet another art house hit for the Spanish auteur in a film that appeared to be the director's most deeply personal work to date.

Although hardly a model of restraint, 2002's Talk to Her is one of Pedro Almodóvar's more subtle outings. Every bit as subversive as, say, All About My Mother or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! it nevertheless works more around the edges, more in the realm of growing disquiet. Not so his followup, 2004's Bad Education (La mala educación): floridly melodramatic, it delights in a style that might be called gay grand guignol.

Underneath all the baroque shenanigans lie Almodóvar’s usual thematic suspects: identity, marginality, and the place of the outsider in the world. Outsiders like the director himself: from the opening credits we are encouraged to regard this as having an autobiographical component. The final card of the opening credits – "Escrita y Dirigida por Pedro Almodovar" – dissolves into a title placard on the wall of the fictional director of the Education storyline: "Escrita y Dirigida por Enrique Goded." We are advised, right up front, that this indeed may be about the Spanish director himself.


Or maybe not. How much of it is autobiographical is an open question, but ultimately not a very interesting one. We do know that Almodóvar went to a Catholic boarding school, and that he’s not too fond of the Church. And the action of Education revolves around what may, or may not have, happened at such a school. Actor Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael García Bernal) – who now wants to be called “Ángel” – shows up at the production offices of director Goded (Fele Martínez) looking for work. He and Goded have a past: they were lovers in a Catholic boarding school. Only problem is, Enrique doesn’t recognize him – cue music – but it has been a long time.

Ignacio does not come empty-handed: he is bearing a story, based on the shared experiences of the two former lovers. Goded is between projects, so he takes it home, despite his reservations about Ignacio. As he settles in to read, we experience – apparently in flashback – the narrative in his hands. A drag queen named Zahara (also played by García Bernal) picks up a guy at a club and takes him back to her hostel with robbery on her mind. As she picks though his wallet, she discovers he’s old friend and lover Enrique Serrano, so she forgoes the theft of his money and scooter, and embarks on her original plan: the blackmailing of Fr. Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the priest who abused her/him and Enrique at that boarding school.


Are you with me? Good. What we appear to be seeing is Bad Education's depiction of the story Ignacio brought to Goded, the one based on their shared experiences. But is it really? It has the feel of a cinematic flashback, but it clearly is not: while Zahara is played by García Bernal, this Enrique is played by another actor (Alberto Ferreiro). Further, it can’t be a dramatization of what really happened between the two, because we just saw objective reality: that Ignacio and Goderd first met, after two decades apart, in the prosaic environs of a production office.

So from the outset, Almodóvar is up to his old tricks: the systematic destabilization of our expectations. He uses the trope of the flashback to mess with our heads. At the same time, as he does so often, he infuses a soapy melodramatic structure with outrageously transgressive behavior. The sex between Zahara and the flashback-Enrique is not only hilarious but hilariously obscene. And because it is between two men, it fans the flames of homoerotic nervousness that reside in all but the most sexually secure heterosexual breast.

But wait! There’s more! We are already suspicious – as is Enrique Goded – about the true identity of Ignacio/Ángel, and now we see him in woman’s guise, and we wonder: just who is this guy? Is he Ignacio or Ángel? Male or female? Gay or straight? And lest we forget, this is a film about film-making: how much of what we’re seeing is meta, part of a film-within-a-film, and how much is objective reality?

Well, none of it, of course. It is all a lie ... 24 lies a second, as Brian de Palma famously said. And nobody uses that notion with more brio than Pedro Almodóvar. After Zahara corners Fr. Manolo in his office, demanding blackmail, we see a flashback of what happened to Ignacio and Enrique at his hands. When it ends, the face of the child Ignacio dissolves into that of Bernal, reinforcing his identification with the child. It throws us off balance. Even though we are pretty sure that Bernal's character isn't who he claims to be, we expect a certain kind of relationship -- of "likeness" -- to be explicated by a match dissolve. In this case, though there is a relationship, it is not what is implied by the cut.

Almodóvar has remarked that he based Ignacio/Ángel/Zahara/Juan on Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley: a completely amoral force with an angelic face. Perhaps his insistence upon being called "Ángel" reflects how he wants to portray himself. Whatever the case, none of it would work without a strong central presence: in a sense, the figure of Ignacio/Ángel represents all the thematic obsessions of our intrepid Spanish director– Almodóvar, that is – rolled into one. And García Bernal plays him with gusto: one moment the wide-eyed young actor, eager for his first big break, and the next a nihilistic, pill-popping drag queen, damaged literally beyond recognition. Later, after all the story lines come together, we see him as "Juan," and it is a darker version still. It is a bravura performance that establishes García Bernal in the pantheon of top film actors of any nationality.


The remainder of the cast is solid, especially Martínez and Giménez Cacho, and as in all of Almodóvar's later output, it is beautifully shot and edited. Although there are elements of film noir at work, it is all wrapped in Almodóvar’s day-glow sensibility, with its pastel art direction and Douglas-Sirk beat. Coupled with cinematographer José Luis Alcaine's beautifully saturated photography, the director's compositional precision produces startlingly beautiful images.

But as in all of Almodóvar's films, the tale is in the telling -- and the subverting. His power as a filmmaker resides in his ability to take socially-accepted notions of reality and propriety and turn them gleefully on their heads. That he makes the process wildly entertaining is the key to his success. In some ways, he's like an impish child: he may do the most outrageous things, and manipulate us in the most shameful ways, but you can't stay mad at him. All you can do is go along for the ride.