Photo by Philippe Antonello
By the time he collected the original-screenplay Oscar for 2002’s extraordinary Talk to Her, the ascension of Pedro Almodóvar from Spanish cinema’s enfant terrible to its elder statesman seemed complete. Still, few could accuse Almodóvar of having softened his edge or making overt bids for respectability, even if Talk to Her was, at the end of the day, a necrophilia romance even a mother could love. Indeed, what’s remarkable about Almodóvar isn’t just how he’s remained faithful to his pet obsessions of gender confusion, sexual repression and taboo couplings as his filmmaking style has evolved beyond the rough-hewn, camp theatricality of his earliest features — it’s that he’s plunged even deeper into that perverse abyss. That he is a master now, capable of some of the most gloriously expressionistic moving pictures this side of Hitchcock and Welles, has only made his subversive side seem that much more radical. Case in point: Almodóvar’s latest, Bad Education, where the sexual-abuse scandals of the Catholic Church become the backdrop for a gleefully macabre film noir whose blindingly intense colors illuminate a wide range of dark habits, and where the requisite femmes fatales just might be chicks with dicks.
A fractured fairy tale told thrice upon a time, Bad Education begins in Madrid in the 1980s, where successful young filmmaker Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez) contemplates (with some help from the tabloid headlines) the subject of his next project. But Almodóvar isn’t content to rest here for long. Soon, he has us ricocheting like an out-of-control pinball between different time periods and planes of reality, fragments of lost innocence and ramparts of blissed-out movie love. Trouble first arrives in the form of aspiring actor Angel (Gael Garcia Bernal), who back when he was called Ignacio was Enrique’s closest school friend. In truth, the two were in love back then, much to the chagrin of their teacher, Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez-Cacho), who was himself infatuated with the boy soprano Ignacio. (In what is surely the year’s most haunting moment musical, Ignacio’s deflowering is set to his high-voiced whine of Henry Mancini’s "Moon River.")
Angel has come bearing a gift, a manuscript called The Visit, which he describes as a fiction inspired by his and Enrique’s childhood. As Enrique reads the text, we’re treated to scenes (filmed in a narrower aspect ratio than the rest of Bad Education) from the movie version taking shape in his mind. Set in the late 1970s, The Visit also depicts a reunion between Enrique and Ignacio — here a transvestite stage performer known as Zahara (also played by Bernal) — as well as Ignacio/Zahara’s attempt to blackmail Father Manolo with threats of publishing a story (also called "The Visit") that exposes their scandalous past. From there, The Visitflashes back (that’s right, a flashback within the movie-within-a-movie) to Enrique and Ignacio’s childhood — their first meeting, their growing affection for one another and the escape they found from their priestly tormentor in the darkened aisles of their local cinema. And before it’s all over, Bad Education will itself step back in time, purporting to show us what really happened in the 1970s between Manolo (now played by Lluis Homar), Ignacio (now played by Francisco Boira) and Ignacio’s brother, Juan (Bernal again).
Got all that? Good. Because you — to say nothing of Enrique — still don’t know the half of it.
Never one to back away from a challenge, Almodóvar is said to have spent the better part of a decade developing Bad Education, and watching the finished film, you get the feeling that much of that time was devoted to figuring out how each and every piece of the film’s jigsaw structure would snap into place. It’s the director’s most complexly ordered film to date — a labyrinth of ids, egos and alter egos waiting around blind corners — and may be the movies’ most deliriously inventive narrative spiral since Adaptation. And like Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, Almodóvar sees the malleability of cinematic time and space as something more than an opportunity for elegantly crafted sleight of hand. As he has shown in the past, from the movie-within-a-movie of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown to the play-within-a-movie of All About My Mother, Almodóvar is a celebrant of the powerful, sometimes overpowering identification that can occur between a spectator and a character on stage or screen. He knows how we can lose ourselves in the dark and, perchance, pick up pieces of somebody else in the process. So Zahara is not merely Ignacio transformed by hair and makeup, but rather Ignacio filtered through the sieve of Audrey Hepburn and the Spanish siren Sara Montiel, whose faces gazed down upon him in his hour of need.
