Almodóvar’s Bad Education a Lesson Well Learned

Madrid. 1980. Acclaimed filmmaker Enirique Goded (Fele Martínez, Open Your Eyes) scrounges through the gossip and tabloid pages with his assistant looking for ideas for his next film. Suddenly, in walks a young, disheveled young man claiming to be both an actor and an old school friend named Ignacio Rodriguez (Gael García Bernal, The Motorcycle Diaries). Enrique remembers Ignacio perfectly even though it has been 16 years since they’ve seen one another, and the hairy creature standing in front of him doesn’t resemble these recollections at all.

But Ignacio seems to know everything about their childhood, nearly every detail, and he’s captured those recollections in a historically fictional narrative he’s entitled “The Visit.” It is a story inspired by the duo’s childhood, recounting in lovingly horrific detail their days at a Catholic boy’s school where they first met, fell in love and were irrevocably separated by their lecherous pedophiliac principal Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez-Cacho, Chronos). From there, it jumps into a future, fictional story where the young boys are reunited, the youngest and frailest of the two having become a drug-addicted transsexual drag performer with the stage name Zahara. Intent on making the wrongs of their youth right, Zahara returns to the school and visits Father Manolo, attempting to blackmail him for his sins of the flesh committed a decade past.

Enrique is excited by “The Visit” and immediately searches out the man claiming to be Ignacio to purchase the rights so he can turn it into a screenplay. The latter agrees, but only if he can play the central character Zahara asking Enrique to trust him to be able to physically and mentally transform into the frail, gender-androgynous stage performer. But the director reveals he has trouble trusting him, now more sure than ever that this man claiming to be his long-lost friend is actually an imposter whom new the real Ignacio only well enough to impersonate his life.

Low and behold the mysterious actor isn’t Ignacio, but in fact his brother Juan, whom after his past argument with Enrique has secretly begun research into becoming a frail and beguilingly beautiful drag queen. Instead of confronting Juan, Enrique is intrigued by the actor’s intense transformation and desire to play a character based upon his own brother, and instead starts up both a torrid and passionate affair and casts him in the central role he covets in hopes he’ll come clean with the truth during filming. But as things move forward, it becomes evident Juan intends to hold onto his secrets no matter how much Enrique begins to fall in love with him, and it isn’t until a mysterious man named Mr. Berenguer (famed Spanish stage actor Lluis Homar) claims to be the real, defrocked Father Manolo that things start coming to light. He offers to tell the director the truth of what happened to Ignacio, and although he knows he should throw the dirty, disheveled old man out Enrique’s morbid curiosity gets the better of him.

Acclaimed director Pedro Almodóvar’s (All About My Mother) latest Bad Education is a multi-layered film within a film within a film that doubles and twirls and spins in and around itself like a pretzel searching for a way to unwind. It is a brazen, ambi-sexual noir that at once embraces the conventions of the genre while at the same time shattering them with explicit wickedness. A masterpiece of character and motivation, the director’s current hot streak begun with 1997’s Live Flesh and continuing through 2001’s Talk to Her gets only hotter with this daring tête-à-tête of sexual infatuation. Calling to mind the film noir’s of Nicholas Ray, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, Clint Eastwood, Jacques Tourneur and others, Almodóvar has fashioned the genre to his own twisted countenance and, as such, emerges nothing less a genius.

Bernal continues his own streak, begun with Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien continuing through the earlier released The Motorcycle Diaries. In many ways, this is a more potent and complex performance than his Saint Ché in the former. Bernal plays three people not one, all of them sitting deep within the recesses of Juan’s tortured mind. He is the ultimate femme fatale, equal parts Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Simmons, Joan Bennett and Rita Hayworth, using sex as a weapon and instrument of corruptive pain more than a tool for pleasure. Bernal encapsulates this duplicity to perverse perfection, strangely seductive as both the whorishly glamorous Zahara (who has a weirdly bizarre resemblance to a Pretty Woman era Julia Roberts) and the masculine cocksure Juan. His is a fascinating, layered portrayal that is the beaten, battered heart at the picture’s center, the driving force behind all of Almodóvar’s awesomely iniquitous machiavellian twists and turns.

Like the best noir, Bad Education is sure not to please everyone. Its enigmatic conclusion reads like 1930’s marquee serial cards, and it is hard to rationalize with Enrique’s ever-increasing sexual psychosis where it comes to the riddle of Ignacio/Juan/Zahara. But there is a refined, symmetrical glee to the way in with Almodóvar manages to tie everything together so brazenly, the movie’s central mystery worth pondering for hours after. Shooting the film with a complex series of frames, aspect ratios and theatrical artifices, the director squeezes film noir with both hands only to squash the very marrow from its bones with one while the other gently strokes the spine to orgiastic bliss. Not since Law of Desire has Almodóvar taken so many loopy, seemingly esoteric and erotically charged chances, and it all fits perfectly with the down and dirty designs sitting at this one’s core.

Film Rating: êêê1/2  (out of 4)