Bad Education

Pedro Almodóvar's new film, Bad Education mixes genres in delighfully subversive ways, adopting the conventions of the traditional film noir, but replacing the femme fatale with a mysterious gay actor who re-enters the life of his first love, now a director. Or so that's how it seems. The film starts with Enrique (Fele Martínez), the film director, trying to find an idea for a new movie, when in walks Ignacio (Gael García Bernal), his first "love," who now wants to be called "Angel," with a screenplay about their youth. The film then recedes into a series of flashbacks about the boys' experiences in a Christian school, where Ignacio is molested by the head priest, the two boys find and explore each other, and Enrique gets sent away. The plot takes so many twists and turns, role-reversals, assumed identities and double-crosses as it spans the late 70s and early 80s, and their childhood early 60s that a plot synopsis would be utterly unhelpful and beside the point.

The film gets divided between childhood flashbacks, a chance meeting later, and, we come to find out later, the film of the experience, which culminates in a fantasy of revenge thwarted by instutitional power and ruthlessness. When the film-inside-the-film concludes, another phase opens when the priest comes back to confront Angel, who plays the main lead in the film. The genius of this is the self-reflective quality of the overly dramatic acting and clichéd plot of the interior film, contrasted against the dark background of the events to follow. Almodovar plays with the film noir genre in the tortuous plotline and the seemingly never-ending shifts in identity, but in case the viewer doesn't get it, the two antagonists, in flashback, go to a theater showing a "film noir week," complete with posters of Double Idemnity and other films noirs, after which they walk into a dark, rainy street.

The film works, I think, as much as any of Almodóvar's films, due to an apt eye for style combined with a tragic tenderness on the part of the characters, especially Enrique, who seems to be the only one moving on in his life in anything approaching a healthy way. The self-reflexivity and genre bending work to complicate a story that is ultimately about passion, forbidden or otherwise, and the pain of remembering lost love. From Enrique's initially unrequited love, to the priest's seemingly uncontrollable passion, to Angel's manipulative sexual endeavors, passion becomes an unfulfillable desire, and, ultimately a tool of penance, rage and desperate grasping. That all of the main characters are men is important, but seems inconsequential in the end. This is not about homosexuality so much as loneliness, revenge, and remembering the past, true themes of film noir, no matter the sexuality.