Bad Education (15)
Dir: Pedro Almodóva
Spain 1hour 45mins subtitles

Programme Notes

An examination on the effect of Franco-era religious schooling and sexual abuse on the lives of two long-time friends.

Pedro Almodóvar has done it again. His new movie is a dizzying and rapturous noir melodrama, a little like Hitchcock's Vertigo with layers of confusion and contradiction. Perhaps it's not as powerful as his most recent film, Talk to Her, nor as extravagantly emotional as All About My Mother, but it is absorbing and playful and sensuous as only this director can be. For me, it is the first Almodóvar movie in which his intensely personal idiom was not alienating. It's certainly another seductive performance from one of Europe's most distinctive and popular film-makers, one of the very few, surely, who can get away with announcing his own legendary status in the credits by just using a surname: "A film by Almodóvar".

His signature tastes and preoccupations are present: a rapture at the beautiful surface of things, a sense of liminal and transgressive sexual identity, a love of role-playing, a passion for melodrama and, of course, the sublime escapism of the cinema. But despite his reputation as a director of women, this is a very male movie: women are of no importance in it, except as the object of gay/diva reverence.

Gael García Bernal gives another outstanding and utterly convincing performance as the nervous young actor who turns up at the offices of a fashionable director, Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), claiming to be Ignacio, his old schoolfriend at the Catholic boarding school where, as 11-year-old boys, they fell in love. Enrique is thrilled to see him, though baffled not to recognise his adult face, and agrees to read the unpublished short story he has written, with a possible view to making it into a film.

This turns out to be a fictionalised account of their affair at school, and how it was destroyed by an abusive priest, Fr Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who was himself obsessed with the beautiful young Enrique; Ignacio is expelled and in the story grows up to be a drag queen and drug addict who finally turns up at the school for a terrible reckoning with the tormentor-priest.

As he reads, the story unfolds ambiguously on screen: is it a flashback? Is it how Enrique sees it in his mind's eye? Or is it, in fact, footage from the movie Enrique is one day to make? In real life, Enrique becomes the lover of this young man - as he believes, for the second time - but the enigma of his identity remains intact. As Enrique crisply puts it: "He allowed me to penetrate him frequently, but only physically." The mystery deepens still further when the real priest eventually turns up at Enrique's production offices, and offers to reveal the truth about the young actor claiming to be Enrique's boyhood love.

"Nothing is less erotic than an actor looking for work," says Enrique sourly after his first meeting with Ignacio, and this acrid and unsentimental truth shines a light on its implied opposite: nothing is more erotic than an actor in work, an actor passionately inhabiting his part, revelling in both authenticity and artifice. Bad Education is about the pleasure of acting, role-playing and fantasy and the way these things can be used as wish-fulfilment, as a way of journeying back in time and conquering the demons of the past, and the present.

For Enrique and Ignacio these demons come from child abuse, and a disturbed and predatory priest who conceived an obsession for young Enrique and wanted to destroy his love for another boy. The school scenes are easily the best in the film, particularly when the infatuated Fr Manolo makes Enrique sing for him. During a day out in the country, Enrique is made to croon Moon River to Manolo's guitar accompaniment, and then has to evade the priest's clumsy lunge. That sequence is hilarious, horrible and heartbreaking, all at once, as is Manolo's birthday party, when Enrique sings the Neapolitan song Return to Sorrento with new, sentimental lyrics of the priest's own devising, praising him as a "gardener" of young souls. Manolo listens trembling with ambiguous passion: it's another superb emotional composition from Almodóvar, with its own delicate and tonally complex sense of tragicomedy.

The levels of illusion, fantasy and reality can be head-spinningly confusing, and I'm bound to say that the director finally loses control, just a little, of his complex web, especially when the script appears to suggest that it is Ignacio rather than Enrique who fascinated Fr Manolo the most, and it isn't clear if this transposition has been deliberately effected by "rewriting" the past. But it yields richly suggestive ideas about impersonation and reality.

The temptation is to read this film against Almodóvar's own life, but given that this is unknowable in any strict sense, Bad Education shows how the act of memory can be a sort of cine-autobiography, in which our past appears as a portfolio of dramatised scenes lit up in our head, and the way we mentally direct these scenes - how we write, photograph, edit and cast them - are all governed by the need to control how painful they can be and to come to terms with the fact that the past can never be changed. Bad Education is bizarre, florid, perplexing and far-fetched, but absorbing and weirdly moving, too.

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

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